Marrow
by Rack
Summary: There’s a secret, deep in the Russian taiga. There’s a secret deep in Violet, too. It may take one to expose the other, along with a familiar face that is secrecy embodied. —VioletSyndrome, dark themes, COMPLETE—
1. i

**Disclaimer:** "And King Tyronius said unto Lord Acapulco, 'Thou shalt give credit where credit is due, not hoard it all for thineself, and must give all due worship and praise to Pixar. Also, thou shalt not put pineapple on pizza.' " Book of Leviticus, chaper 4, verse 7.

**Notes:** Yes, before anybody flames me, I'm well aware that this story is over-angsty.

**Thanks:** You know who's wonderful? You know who put up with me and this story during its fits and starts, stops and hiatuses, about ten million re-writes of the eighth chapter plus, and my sporadic communication? Know who gave me some wonderful advice and encouragement even before the story had taken its final form, even before the first draft was finished, and who gave me a chapter-by-chapter replay of the good, the bad and the ugly? _Crzysheelf_, that's who. Go now and worship her. I mean it.

**And also:** Thanks to _Guille van Cartier,_ as her pictures of Syndrome (particularly 'Synlet: Kidnap,' 'Syndrome: Camera room' and 'Synletsketches: NLtV spoliers') were the inspiration for _Marrow_'s Syndrome. Big time. So thanks there!

* * *

The most terrible, intractable, legacy of torture is the killing of desire - that is, of curiosity, of the impulse for connection and meaning-making, of the capacity for mutuality, of the tolerance for ambiguity and ambivalence. For these patients, to know another mind is unbearable. To connect with another is irrelevant. They are entrapped in what was born(e) during their trauma, as they perpetuate the erasure of meaning, re-enact the dynamics of annihilation through sadomasochistic, narcissistic, paranoid, or self-deadening modes of relating, and mobilize their agency toward warding off mutuality, goodness, hope and connection. In brief, they live to prove death.  
_- Nguyen L., 'The question of survival: the death of desire and the weight of life.'_

--I--

_The lengths that I will go to, the distance in your eyes...  
I thought that I heard you laughing; I thought that I heard you sing.  
I think I thought I saw you try.  
_- Losing My Religion: R.E.M.

* * *

"So hello, Violet. Or Invisigirl. Which would you prefer?"

Violet smiled across the desk at Agent Rick Dicker, who despite having a perfectly good chair seemed content to stand next to his desk. She had been pleasantly surprised at receiving the personal summons from the man, which had read more like a request anyway. A quick message to her parents had let them know she was heading to the NSA office on "official matters". She'd liked the sound of that. It had made her feel like a professional super, even though she was still seventeen and one year away from official independence in the eyes of the agency.

"Hey, Mr. Dicker. Um, either's good really, I mean, it doesn't really matter. But thanks for asking." Violet shyly tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, flattered at how Dicker was treating her as an adult.

"Well, kid, the reason I called you in today is that I've got a case for you, if you want it."

_Official_ independence, in the priorities of the NSA, took second place to a super's abilities in a situation that required them. She was needed for a case that required her unique talents. Violet's face took on an intelligent frown, while inside she whooped with glee. She'd been solo-ing for a while now – hell, she'd even got her own costume, a purple and black affair – but this was the first time she'd actively been assigned a case to deal with. She was young, at seventeen, but her mom had started dealing with cases when she was the same age. Violet spared a brief moment of though for her mother, who had seemed very emotional about the fact that Violet was beginning to hold her own as a super; her powers, whilst defensive in nature, still were strong enough to handle most foes. Imagination, that was the key. An impenetrable, airtight bubble around any enemy was enough to bring them down and knock them out. Invisibility, also, was an underrated power – stealth was a school of thought that few supers subscribed to, and yet had some of the best results. Violet made a face for a moment, thinking that it was such a shame that being the best also meant you had an incurable sense of drama.

She took the file from Dicker and flicked immediately to the first page. There was her NSA profile page; a photo of herself in her new super outfit, replete with her trademark long black hair and wide trusting eyes. The words 'invisibility' and 'stealth' in her bio details were highlighted. Flicking to the next page, she found the summary sheet of the case in question. It was topped by a photo of a man stood proudly in front of a boiling beaker of a green liquid. She took in all the immediate signs: lab coat, laboratory equipment, slightly glazed expression with just a hint of satisfaction. The caption read_ Dr. G. Harker._

"Mad scientist?" she mused aloud, glancing up at the agent stood contemplatively in front of the large plate glass windows that opened up his office to a view of the world outside. Dicker nodded.

"We think so. Got a lot of funding for a project through dubious means, we're not sure how. But we _are_ pretty sure that this project should never be undertaken. Our informant couldn't tell us any more, apart from that it was incredibly unpleasant, completely illegal and totally insane."

Violet nodded thoughtfully, glancing through the rest of the file. Life history of the man, pretty standard, born, raised, school, college, degree in human anatomy, PhD in advanced biochemistry and (by the looks of the experiment list) an honorary doctorate in Psycopathy. His story ended a few years ago, possibly the point where he'd retired from the noble betterment of mankind to something slightly more sinister. It didn't seem too bad. Compared to Syndrome, who had been thoroughly crazed, this scientist seemed merely slightly vexed.

"So where do I come into this?" she asked Dicker, lifting her eyes from the file to see him sitting down heavily into the chair opposite her. She spared a moment of thought for him, too. He'd always looked tired and worn-down, but age was hard and the secrecy that surrounded his job was evidently beginning to take its toll. Violet wondered how long it would be before the man retired.

"You have good stealth abilities, which will be needed in this case. Yeah, the man's evidently got a screw loose, but he's still a genius. He's going to be able to handle anything that's thrown at him, and what's more, I'll bet he can twist it to his advantage. So we need you to do what so few of our other supers can." He paused here for a moment, taking the file back from Violet before flicking through it and handing it back open to the schematic of a building. "We need you to infiltrate the place without being detected and destroy any means of conducting illicit research that you find. If you can bring him in, this would be a bonus, but if it means risking your own neck don't bother. We can always go after him again later. Instead of throwing a frontal assault his way, we're asking you to do a little reconnaissance and... shall we say... tinkering."

Violet grinned for a moment, liking the delicate stress on 'tinkering'.

"Main objective, Agent Dicker?"

"Destruction of illegal project. An infiltration entry. Grab his notes if you can. Oh, and don't get caught."

_Simple,_ _easy-to-follow, yet challenging_. Violet liked this case already. She stood up, still holding the file, and tossed a quick grin at Dicker. "I'm on it, sir."

--I--

_One week later_

It was blindingly well-lit in the corridor, but that didn't matter to Violet. It was hard to be noticed when the light passes right through you, and Violet could simply walk down the corridor, provided she hugged the walls when guards passed and didn't make much noise.

For an underground base it was pretty well-maintained, Violet mused as she pressed against the wall to let another guard pair pass. She slipped around the corner and continued down another hallway. The walls were clean and damp-free despite being made of stone, and the floor was unmarked and in good repair. She consulted her internal map again – she'd need to take another left soon – and continued with her train of thought. It _was_ pretty good base, all in all. The guard patrols were irregular and there were often differing numbers of guards on each shift. They looked well-rested and alert, but no-one was really alert enough to catch an invisible, almost soundless intruder who knew where she was going and had one eye on them at all times.

Violet turned left to find her path blocked by a pair of extremely solid-looking steel doors. She paused for a moment, and then pressed herself against the wall. A guard, clothed in the nondescript charcoal-coloured uniform of the guards here (who nevertheless had clear visors on their helmets, to avoid the ol' nick-some-unifoms-and-invade tactic) walked mindlessly past her before inserting his keycard into the door. It _whoosh_ed open with a gentle sound, and Violet closely trailed the man through the already-closing doors.

She stopped as soon as she was inside and pressed herself up against the wall once more, taking the moment to look at her surroundings.

Laboratory glassware covered the entirety of the wall opposite her. It was large (easily fifteen feet tall and thirty feet wide, even when supported by a metal table that had vials of liquids underneath it) and it was complex, filled with a variety of fluids all colours of the rainbow. A few men in lab coats were bustling about the base of this enormous structure, while a middle-height, slim man in a spotlessly-white lab coat stood some distance away with his hands clasped behind his back, a faint smile and a proprietorial air.

Violet slipped around the wall so she was a little nearer and took a moment to study him properly. His face was currently entertaining an expression of amused benevolence, and the smile playing about his lips looked no more insane than her own. Yes, he was definitely the man from the photo – the rich brown hair (albeit now thinly streaked with grey) and rimless spectacles were the immediate clues, but now she was closer she could see that the lines of his face matched that of the photo. A positive identification. She marked it off her mental checklist.

It was odd, she mused, as she watched him stroll about beneath the towering glass structure like a proud father, that he seemed so balanced. Then she chided herself. The qualifications for the terminally deranged did not necessarily include a maniacal laugh, foaming at the mouth, a name prefixed with a synonym of 'insane' and a frequent cry of "MAD! They thought I was MAD! BUT I'LL SHOW THEM ALL! AHAHAHAHAHA!"

_But it would have been nice,_ the traditionalist in her retaliated. Still, he did look more like the next door neighbour's dad than the perpetrator of an immense evil. That benign little smile said_ trust me, you know you want to._

She moved around him ever so carefully, aware that at this distance even the slightest noise could tip him off, wary that even the noise of brushing of cloth would alert him.

But no. She made it, unmolested by shouty guards and gibbering scientists, to the very corner of that monstrous glass edifice. And then, feeling like this was the easiest mission in the world, she brought up a thin shield behind the structure and pushed just the tiniest bit.

It was rather marvellous actually, and Violet glanced back just as she reached the door to see the large, fragile construction arc delicately towards the floor like a swan dive. The noise it made when it smashed was both wonderful and terrible. Smiling to herself, her invisibility held strong amongst the confused babbling, she slipped through the door as more guards ran in. She tapped her wrist once, twice, three times. Mission Completed. Ground control, I'm coming home. She slipped along the corridors, ghostly and silent, and left the shouting behind her as she headed up and away.

--I--

_Four years later_

Agent Rick Dicker opened the door to the office, and took a moment to observe the slight figure typing away at a laptop on the desk. She wore a long-sleeve black t-shirt and that, combined with the black hair that reached halfway down her neck, accentuated her pale skin. She was a chiaroscuro of a girl, all black-and-white and angles-and-lines, made of the slightly harsher profile that came from being slim to the point where the muscle on the frame formed the contours of the body. She contrasted sharply with the office, a pleasant space made of pastel walls and healthy plants, books aplenty on a hardwood bookcase and plate-glass windows. Violet and the office were an odd juxtaposition of styles, especially in a place where she used to fit so well. Dicker was once again forcibly reminded of how much the girl in front of him had changed.

"I've got a case for you, if you want it."

Dicker could have kicked himself. Those were the exact same words he'd said to her_ last_ time, and –

His train of thought was rudely derailed when Violet looked up. Her purple eyes were flat and her face was expressionless, and yet completely focused on him. There was no indication that her mind was still on her laptop. Dicker, long-time veteran of underground government work, felt a tingle of unease; he never, ever got used to this look, this face that Violet wore every day now. It was so unlike her old self, the frail young butterfly with shy eyes and a hopeful smile.

But he was a professional. Always a professional. He proffered the inch-think manilla-coloured file with his usual grave despondency, and Violet carefully pushed her laptop to one side and regarded Dicker without emotion. Despite her apparent lack of curiosity, Dicker knew that she was interested. His suspicion was confirmed when he placed the file on the desk before her, open to the second page, and she pulled it closer. Ignoring her laptop completely she picked up the file and studied the summary page intently before flicking through the following ones. Her face bore an expression of focused thoughtfulness, the merciless intentness of which scared Dicker, seasoned manager of the slightly unhinged, to the bone.

"Why this case?"

Dicker thought about her question. What he wanted to say was: look, kid, we think it would be good for you to take this case. Not because it's easy, or unremarkable. Exactly the opposite. It's been confusing some of the fastest minds in the department for a good while, and ever since you came back from that disappearing episode you've been thinking in a different way – sort of twisty, but really,_ really_ efficiently. We don't know what happened in those eight months that you completely vanished off the radar, or where that scar on your face came from, or why you returned to us pale, tight-lipped, practically emaciated and refusing to speak a word about what occurred. All we do know for _sure_ is that we gave you a typical mad-scientist case, you sent the Mission Complete signal to say you were out, home and dry, and then you never came back. Now you don't sleep much any more, you spent the months after your return becoming the best hand-to-hand fighter in the NSA, hah, a jack of all blades, and your sense of humour appears to have been surgically removed. Whatever occurred, whatever happened to you _wherever_ you went, it changed you from the shy, amiable, pleasant girl you used to be at the tender age of seventeen to this cold, closed-off fighting machine. You turned eighteen during the time you disappeared, and it's like you became a completely different person. Anyway, that's why we think you'd suit this case; you seem capable of thinking in different sets of dimensions to us, and it'll give you something to do beside your basic super work. Which, by the way, you've become much better at. And faster. And more lethal. Yes, the morgue noticed there's been a sharp increase in supervillain bodies making their way down there. We would like to put some of them on trial_ alive,_ you know. What the hell _happened_ to you to make change so much, to make you forgo everything you used to hold so dear? And incidentally, kid, could you stop looking at me like that? It's freaking me_ and_ the department out.

Instead, he said: "It needs a new approach. You've been good at that of late."

She regarded him once more, and Dicker's mind registered the scar again although his eyes never flickered to it. It was thin and silver, starting high on her right cheekbone. It traced the contour of the bone for a couple of inches before heading sharply downwards, curving very smoothly across her throat to intersect with both of the tendons in her throat at the point where her collarbones met. It did a rather good job of detracting a viewer's gaze from her eyes which, these days, were cold, flat and hard. Dicker shied away from the description 'dead', even though the word kept presenting itself for inspection in the treacherous recesses of his mind. It was a word belied by the fact she seemed to be in good health; her hair was dark and glossy, and complimented her pale yet healthy complexion. Still, the worrying concept that he was simply talking to a corpse that still had all the mechanisms running kept occurring to him. It was playing hell with his composure.

Her eyes dipped back to the file, and Dicker was mildly grateful for that. She unclipped the photo from the first page and held it up to the bright winter light shining in from the spacious, pleasant window behind her. Dicker knew what it was: a satellite photo taken recently of a half-mile-square plot of land in Siberia. A flat, barren expanse of snow dotted with several coniferous trees.

"The taiga," she said, unimpassioned, studying the photograph from several angles, and finally turning it upside down. "The edge of the taiga. Taken in the last few weeks."

Dicker nodded. "Siberia," he said, his eyes never leaving hers as she studied the photo intently. She turned it right way up again, tilted it to the left, a little more so, and then held it upside down again. Her face bore a look of intense concentration that Dicker, who had observed her behaving this way before, knew meant that she was studying the picture from several angles, not all of them physical.

"Artificial construction underground... new. Built in the last five years."

Dicker wasn't surprised. Violet, in her uncanny way of spotting what other people missed (often by looking at it in a completely alien direction), had noticed what it had taken one of the surveillance team members three years to work out. They'd noticed the first signs only by accident, when a random sweep of the three-hundred or so miles around the Russian city Noril'sk (by an overly-enthusiastic environmentalist agent looking for more signs of air pollution) had shown a temperature increase by 2 degrees centigrade, about one hundred and ninety miles southeast of the city. The agent in charge of the sweep had noted it down and handed it on to his superior, along with a triumphant smirk of "I_ told_ you global warming was affecting the taiga." The superior had taken a closer look and thought it odd how global warming was raising the temperature of an isolated bit of land, and that none of the land surrounding it was affected by it. He'd never heard of _localised_ global warming before.

And so the thermal image had been shifted to architectural experts, who had confirmed it was the right kind of heat signature for a building that was intended to be concealed from most kinds of detection. And then someone even further up decided this needed _proper_ investigation, and from there...

Well, it all came down to him now, and that should be enough to tell _anyone_ something was suspected.

"How can you tell there's a construction there?" Dicker asked, curious nonetheless. She traced something on the photograph with one finger.

"The lines on the ground are too straight. Erosion should have worn them down to create a smooth floor, but the construction disturbed the ground and threw up new contours, especially where they dug down. The snow hasn't settled on them right. You can see the shadows are wrong. They're too regular."

She passed him the photograph, her eyes catching his for a moment in that too-intense stare he hated so much. He held it upside-down as she had and looked at it again. She was right. The shadows cast by the trees didn't quite match up to some of the shadows on the ground, and one of the trees' shadows was a little disjointed, as if the level of the ground next to it was different. He could just made out that this anomaly extended to a square-ish plot of land. Flipping the photograph the right way around, the signs were invisible.

"Sometimes discrepancies are easier to spot when the problem itself is inverted," said Violet. Dicker filed that away for future reference, not liking the cold-calm voice in which she had said it. He didn't like_ anything_ about this new cold-calm Violet, in fact. No-one did, least of all her family, whom she now had little contact with. She'd separated herself from the structure of her family, the bones of her very existence that had mattered to her so long ago; she'd removed herself from the marrow of warmth and love that had been the centre of that unit. She seemed cold and unaffected, an impression that scared most people – including those who worked around her, even fellow supers. And she certainly didn't look like her fellow supers; she stood out a mile from them, especially the women. They were broad-breasted beauties, for the most part, all nineteen-fifties' glamour that came from having muscle and curves at the same time, hairstyles that had to cope with high-speed winds and unexpected sub-arctic temperatures. But Violet was more macilent than them, toned harsher, a creature of contradictions: her black hair and too-pale skin were one immediate example, her apparent health and empty demeanour another. There was something that didn't quite fit anymore: perhaps because the others were creatures of curves and rounded edges, flowing hiplines and smooth silhouettes, she was made of edgéd lines. She was starker and totally in control of herself, to a degree that was frightening. Everything about her was measured – her stance, her movements, even her breathing. She might have seemed dead to Dicker, but it was not a mindless death. It was pure control, a bizarre zombification, a mastery over herself that wasn't right. It was almost as if she knew what made her human, and she was holding it away from herself. Whatever softness in her had been baked solid – she'd placed every emotion she owned in a box separate to the main, and this ruthless automaton was what was left.

He handed the photo back to Violet. She clipped it into the file carefully, and briefly read the summary page.

"Basic reconnaissance," she stated, and Dicker nodded again.

"Find out what's going on. This doesn't seem right to anyone in the agency." Like you, he added mentally. "Send back an immediate report. Get involved if you have to, but only if you have to. If there's time to call for backup, do so. We've contacted the Russian government, we've confirmed it's not one of their bases and they're going to allow one U.S. representative in to investigate this. Especially since we told them you have... special skills."

Violet flicked to the back of the file, where a train ticket was stapled to a map of central Russia. Trans-Siberian Railway, the ticket read. Its due date of departure was the next week. Dicker reached over and turned the map so Violet was looking at it correctly.

"While the Russian government were all right with letting you poke around in their jurisdiction, they weren't so happy with allowing Americans to fly over it," he noted dryly, watching her for any sign of amusement. None was forthcoming. "So we've got you a private flight to Moscow, and from there you'll make your way to Novosibirsk via the trans-Siberian railway. The Novosibirsk Tolmachevo Airport has a Russian government helicopter waiting to take you to Noril'sk. From there, you'll be picked up by a much smaller helicopter that'll travel out to the central Siberian plateau, and drop you off three miles from this location." Dicker tapped the map with one finger. "Make the three miles as... _slyly_ as you can, and check out the place. When you're done, make the three miles back and the helicopter will be on standby to get you out."

Violet traced her route on the map with one finger, and then tapped the charts that were clipped to it.

"Winter in the taiga. The temperature will be below fifteen Celsius."

"Yep. We're gonna get Edna to kit you out –"_ If you don't scare her to death, of course,_ "– and you'll have an emergency pack to take with you. A thermal tent, dehydrated food, lightsticks, chemical heat sources, an emergency radio. Some other stuff. If you get stuck, you won't be warm, but you can probably stave off hypothermia for a few days. Real comforting thought, I know, but it beats death by a long shot."

She made no reply, still intently studying the map, but her mouth twisted up in a smile that never made it to her eyes. The scar on her cheek bunched the skin in unusual ways. Still a little unnerved, Dicker turned to leave.

"When does the flight leave?"

"Three days' time," he replied, without turning to look at her. He knew she'd be engrossed in the contents of the file.

"I'll be on it," she replied simply.

Dicker turned the doorknob and was about to leave when he threw one last glance at her. As predicted, she was reading the information contained within the folder. It was probably the way the light was striking her face, but for the first time, Dicker noticed how_ drawn_ she seemed. How thin. Of course, she'd been slim to start with, and since her return she'd lost any excess poundage that she'd possibly had left over. She didn't seem unhealthily thin to look at, she just gave the impression of someone who was efficient and let nothing go spare, even if it was her own body. She couldn't possibly have lost weight, as she'd replaced it with bitter lines of muscle on her training program.

But the sunlight was illuminating the pronunciation of her cheekbones and the clean razor line of her jaw. For a moment, Dicker applied the same twisty logic that Violet had used on the photograph – he turned her image upside down in his head, turned the picture around a few times until it fit differently. And from this differing perspective (when he looked past the wired muscle and the unhealthy self-control) he saw how her bones were close to the surface of her skin, despite the padding of her muscles.

It was so clear to see, especially to a man who'd known her so well before 'it' had happened, and especially in the new lethality of her actions. She was determined to self-destruct, she was driving herself towards it, fully, knowingly and completely. It wasn't too late for her. She could be turned back. But she was alone, so incredibly isolated, and he knew that unless someone bridged that chasm of space she perceived lay between herself and others she would drown in the darkness, drown in the blood, and drown willingly. And for the first time in four years, Dicker didn't wonder about what had happened to her, or how and why she had changed – he wondered why she was still affected by it.

He closed the door behind him as he left, filled with an inexplicable sense of sorrow, and moved on.

--I--

The train sped over the landscape with deceptive speed, and Violet noted the way its shadow moved with an eerie grace over the smooth, snow-covered ground. Her mind was busy, compiling and dissecting the file she'd memorised in preparation for the trip, thinking of different ways of approaching the target. She never let her mind rest. Not ever. If she kept busy, she wouldn't have to focus on... other things. She also had to concentrate on her self-control, the iron barrier that separated her conscious mind from her emotions. It hadn't been easy it first, but her circumstances had demanded it. She was still prone to slips, however, although she was careful to never let them show.

Macabre. That was the word she'd heard used to describe her. Only once, and only in passing, in a conversation she wasn't privy to and should never have heard.

In that moment, she'd slipped a little. She'd wanted to explode. She'd wanted to turn and, with her long hunter's strides eating up the floor, deliberately hurt that person until they truly understood what 'macabre' meant. She'd wanted to write the dictionary definition on the wall for them using their own blood.

But the tricks she'd learned in her time Away (as she referred to it in her head) meant she'd managed to shut her emotions down completely before she lost control, and for that she was mildly grateful. She still had dominance over herself, and while she had that, it didn't matter much what else people said. And after the sterile halcyon that followed her iron-strong calming process had subsided, she'd felt mild shock that she'd even thought such violent behaviour. Focus. Control. Keep it steady. She'd kept walking along the corridor, without even a mis-step to betray everything that had flashed through her mind on hearing that one, simple word.

That the 'macabre' had been said in jest helped her to regain control. It was simply a reference to her current outfit, which was totally black, barring a purple omega symbol on the back of each hand. She wasn't Invisigirl, anymore, either. She didn't really have a codename. People just referred to her as Violet, as if that said everything that needed to be known about her. She left it at that. Things like that weren't really important these days. Very little was.

This mission, for example. It really didn't warrant the attention of a super. Which meant one of two things: either that she was being shipped away for a little while (an enforced vacation, perhaps?), or there was more to this case than she'd been told. _Perhaps both,_ murmured a cold, calculating voice in her mind. She acknowledged this as a possibility. This kind of reconnaissance required only a careful agent decked out in Edna's finest, not the super-stealth she was capable of.

On the other hand... Rick Dicker, solid as a rock, the most dependable agent the NSA had to offer, didn't feel right about it. She knew from the way he didn't quite sound like he believed himself when he'd said 'Find out what's going on' and 'Get involved only if you have to.' She'd also noticed the way he'd been looking at her when he thought she wasn't looking; a sort of dangerous puzzlement directed right at her.

Should anyone ever find out what happened to her during her time Away, Violet would place her money on Agent Rick Dicker as the person who would dig it up.

Violet had drawn away from everyone since she'd stumbled back into the NSA building with her mind in grim lines and trying (successfully) to hide the blood. She'd kept everything she'd felt at arm's length. She'd intended it to be a temporary measure to help her cope and deal with the immediate repercussions, but it had kept the pain away and worked so well she'd adopted it as permanent practise. Keeping her feelings at bay meant she could focus on the tasks in hand. The only downside was it required tremendous amounts of concentration to maintain, a sort of icy stiffness that numbed her emotional extremities. She'd made it habit, to protect herself as much as to protect other people.

She tuned her mind out from such morbid thought with an ease born of practise. Instead, she noted how the sun had long since set, and that she should probably eat something. Violet carefully tucked her documents in her pocket – Russian police were fond of spot checks – and locked her cabin door behind her.

The jolting and swaying of the train was something that Violet hadn't needed too long to get used to and she made her way along the corridor with an easy, open grace. Others, however, weren't as balanced as she, and as she opened the door to the dining carriage someone fell past her.

Instincts she always had on high alert had meant that she'd been able to grab the boy's arm as he fell forward, a lighting strike of surgical precision.

"Asta'rawz'hnee," she said mildly. _Careful._

The boy took one look at her, removed his arm from her grasp with a frightened expression and almost theatrical care, and continued his way along the carriage at a faster pace. Violet looked after him for a moment, her face expressionless despite her faint puzzlement. What had he been so scared of?

Deciding it wasn't worth bothering about, she entered the elegant dining cart and made her way to a member of staff. Using some of the phrases she'd picked up from her English-Russian dictionary, she managed to communicate that she wanted a sandwich instead of a full meal. The young man nodded his understanding with an almost overcautious degree of politeness. He left the cart and then re-entered about two minutes later with a well-wrapped baguette sandwich.

"Spaseeba," Violet said calmly. _Thanks._ Responding to his training, the young man replied with a shaky "Spaseeba, preekhadeet'ye a'pyats." _Thankyou, come again._ Violet gave him a quick nod and headed back, aware that she'd garnered a few stares. She put it down to her accent, which was probably awful, and started to make her way back to her compartment.

She'd just shut and locked the door behind her, securing herself in her own two-berth first-class 'spalny wagon' (as it was known), when the pain hit her.

It was like a freight train to the forehead. Every nerve in her head lit up like a magnesium flare, drowning every other sense in the body by their sheer blinding brilliance. Her knees gave out without warning and she slumped to the floor, one hand grasping the edge of the windowsill in a deathgrip. Her face was steady, calm, and white as a sheet; her control over herself even in such a situation was superb. But she was as close to panic as she'd ever allow herself to be, as close to dread as she could get before she clamped down hard on the emotion. She knew what the migraines heralded, and she had to stop it before it got any further.

Without moving from her position on the floor, her other hand found her daypack and pulled it closer. She reached inside it and withdrew a bottle of pills. It took her a moment to prise her hand from the windowsill, but she coerced it into operation. With calm, sure movements, she unscrewed the top of the bottle, tipped two yellow pills into her hand, and dry-swallowed them.

She didn't move from that position for ten minutes, hair hanging in her face and swaying gently with the motion of the train. She had to work hard to fight the nausea down. The migraines had been coming for a while now: sudden, random and unpredictable as hell. But she had her trusty bottle to help with that; her lovely tube of faked normality helped her when, about once every month or so, the pain struck like a hammer blow. They always forewarned the really bad days, predicting the future with unnerving accuracy.

They weren't wrong this time, either. Long after the pills had taken full effect, a few hours before dawn, Violet woke on her swaying bunk. There was an icy sweat coating her body, an ache of tears that wouldn't come, and her fingers stuffed in her mouth to stop the screaming.

* * *

_To be continued._


	2. ii

_You're so cold, but you feel alive._  
- So Cold: Breaking Benjamin

* * *

The helicopter flight from Novosibirsk Tolmachevo airport was a long one; at eight hundred miles, it gave her plenty of time to recover from the previous night on the train, an experience that still made her feel less-than-sound, although she made no visible sign of it. The helicopter was Russian military, according to the well-spoken and barely-accented Russian sergeant who was briefing her as to the details of the travelling arrangements. To be specific, it was a Kamov Ka-60-1 "Kasatka" transport helicopter that could hold up to sixteen troops or six stretchers, and it was flying at near its top speed of one hundred and eighty-five miles per hour. The sergeant must have been very proud of the helicopter, as Violet certainly couldn't figure out why she needed to know all this.

The man in question, Sergeant Aleksei Zharov, was a deceptively thin, sandy-brown-haired man who looked fit enough to be anywhere between thirty-five and forty-five years old. He was almost ridiculously slight, likely because his metabolism was so volcanic, or possibly so nuclear, that he could greet Violet at the airport in minus fifteen centigrade weather jacketless, and with his shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows. And despite his incredible slimness, the tendons on his forearms rippled at even the tiniest movement and his shoulders had a depth to them that went beyond normal musculature. He was thin, but he was by no means weak, making him appear taller than his five feet and eight inches' worth of height.

His leanness showed up in his face, as well. It was narrow, with hollow cheeks deeply creased from where he smiled. His brown-sandy hair and half-tan went well with his olive shirt and matching trousers, and in turn with the murky green of the helicopter; he looked as though he belonged there. His eyes, brown and guarded despite his open nature, tracked Violet's every movement as though he were trying to read her. He was having a hard time of it. Very little of Violet was readable.

But it was Zharov's hands that left the largest impression on Violet. They were deft, sure things that never trembled or made involuntary movements, with a long and almost-faded scar on his left palm. She could only describe them as _clever_; he'd found a way of storing his intelligence in his hands. Which wasn't to say he was dense, oh, no. There was a quick, wiry, foxlike alertness to him that suggested automatic suspicion of everyone and everything, something Violet wholeheartedly approved of. But she'd watched him checking the startup sequence for the helicopter and she'd seen how his fingers moved with a strange intelligence that all at once conveyed and belied intricate conscious thought on his part. She'd known then, instantly, that his speciality must have been electronics: there was no way he could have done anything else, with hands like those. The measure of control he exerted over them was awesome (whether he knew it or not), in every sense of the word: while limited to his hands, was a graceful and effortless well-oiled measure of simplicity. It leant him such a dextrousness that she could practically see him twisted forearms-deep into the electronics of an inert machine until his fingers somehow made it remember, all at once, in an instant, how it worked.

"Agent Violet?"

His voice came through crisply and clearly in the communication system in her ear defenders. Violet dragged her eyes away from his steepled fingers to meet his eyes again. He was watching her with equal parts puzzlement and caution.

"Yes?"

"You seemed... distracted."

Once again, his English was almost perfect, with only a double quality on the r's and a levity on the t's to remind her of his Russian home language. Violet considered her response carefully.

"I was thinking about this... mission, for want of a better word, Sergeant. I understand it needs investigating. I may even understand it _might_ need to be investigated by someone with my kinds of abilities. What I don't understand is why it needs to be headed by a tactical electrician, unless they are expecting difficulties of that nature. And if this _is_ simply a reconnaissance mission, what difficulties can we really expect?"

Violet got the impression that she was seeing one of the rare times the man was shocked.

"So there's something more to this mission," she continued flatly, after the brief pause. "Something the superiors are suspicious of, because they wouldn't send us into the fray like this without telling us the dangers."

There was a very dangerous edge on the fringes of Zharov's voice when he responded with a quiet "How do you know I am an electrician?"

"Your hands," she said simply.

To his credit, Zharov held her gaze and did nothing so crass as to look at his hands, but she did see them clench momentarily, even though the rest of him relaxed somewhat.

"Your Agent Dicker said you had special skills... that you thought in different ways," he said at last. Violet simply held his stare and let him judge for himself. He didn't look unnerved, but his body language was just a little too relaxed. Violet grudgingly acknowledged a master at work. Instead, he nodded towards her with a skilful attempt at moving the conversation on.

"I see you bear a scar."

Violet nodded. She made no move to say more. Zharov, clever as he was, understood immediately.

"It has a past, I see."

Violet nodded again. Zharov smiled, the lines at the corners of his mouth rippling as the skin was tugged by the sparse flesh. He held up his left hand and showed Violet the scar she'd noticed previously.

"I, too. Sometimes the stories are best kept, am I right?"

She made no move, but regarded Zharov thoughtfully. He took her silence as an answer and smiled again. As he started a conversation in Russian with the two pilots in the front of the craft, Violet turned to the centre of the helicopter, where a pile of gear lay like a hibernating bear. Edna had really gone to town on this cold-weather stuff, she mused, possibly because she got to do so little of it. For a woman used to custom-tailoring suits that had to withstand their owners bursting into fires of one thousand degrees plus, she'd proclaimed it "no matter, no matter dahlink" to design clothing that could withstand up to fifty degrees the other way.

Violet was currently wearing her base layers: a black long-sleeve t-shirt, very close-fitted black combat pants, thin gloves (chosen more for their ability to repel water than any heat-containing capacity) and a snug black beanie hat, all designed to E's magic invisibility-cloth formula and to Violet's specification. Her boots were in the pile with the other gear, and on her feet were a sort of fluffy foot-glove, a heavy sock with structure, pliability and basic rubber soles. The boots, a sort of heavy godfather-of-all-hiking-boots affair, would go over these. They had deep treads and grooves in the side for snowshoe straps, which were also in the pile of gear.

She wasn't wearing her black super's mask for this mission, though. She'd had a quiet word with Agent Dicker about it, and they'd agreed that it wouldn't be needed. Any situation involving her need for stealth would be dealt with accordingly, and as the mission didn't seem to pose much need for that there was no point attracting the Russian soldier's attention to the fact she was superhuman. She had undisclosed 'special skills', that's all they needed to know.

Violet's personal inventory was disrupted when the intercom in her headphones allowed her to hear one of the pilots say, very quietly, "_Govno_."

She had no time to ponder the translation of this unpleasantly ominous-sounding word before the entire world violently wrenched itself around. Violet, as ready for the unexpected as she always was, was nevertheless flung against the wall of the helicopter before she could grab hold of anything. Pulling herself in tightly to a bar on the wall, her mind a hyperaware hive of adrenaline, she calculated every possible escape route within seconds as the helicopter continued to flip and turn violently in what was unmistakably a downward spiral. Her headphones had been thrown off amidst this whirling, tumbling, painful cacophony of movement but she still couldn't hear the fast _chopchop_ noise associated with rapidly-rotating blades. This was not confidence-inspiring. But there was no panic in Violet, never any panic. Not like this. Not for this.

They hit the ground.

The worst part, Violet thought later, wasn't the feeling as much as the _noise_. It was a harsh crunch/bang/scream of tortured metal that made her do an immediate personal inventory to check for broken bones. But it could have been much, much worse, as the unlikely vision of an unconscious Sergeant Zharov floating mid-air testified. Still holding on to the metal bar on the wall, Violet kept her power to the spontaneous shield wrapped around the inside of the helicopter running as she surveyed the situation with a mind that didn't need time to adjust. The walls crawled with a strange purple glow, like a solid heat vapour nevertheless trapped in the form of a bubble. The antigravity effect held Zharov carefully in the air and had protected the two pilots from any harm as might be attained from whiplash or, more likely, permanent and disabling injury that came from falling on to the taiga in a large metal craft from a height of five hundred feet and at one hundred and eighty-five miles per hour. Keeping her hand in contact with the wall at all times, she walked over the wall of the helicopter with the door above her and gently guided Zharov's unconscious form down. Then she let the field go.

The entire helicopter lurched to the side again but Violet rode the movement with the same grace she'd used on the train, allowing her knees and feet to adapt to the change of level. There was the dangerous sound of creaking metal, but then the helicopter didn't move again.

Violet looked up. The sliding door to the helicopter, the one she'd entered into, was above her; she knew now that the helicopter was crashed onto its right side like a drunken wasp. Clambering awkwardly forward, she saw that both pilots were strapped firmly to their chairs, apparently unharmed, and only semiconscious. The helicopter itself was utterly silent – the electronic systems and the engines were both out. The noiselessness from such a sudden landing was... _weird_, and there was no other way Violet could phrase it. She'd spent the last seven days in a perpetual state of travel, whether it plane, train or helicopter. Now the only sound was the silence of the taiga outside and it threw Violet's thinking somewhat.

The light fell in through the door window and illuminated the interior of the helicopter with a brilliance that only clear skies and white snow could achieve. Violet checked for their gear and found it in a tangled pile at the other end of the helicopter. She was just sorting it out into separate piles when a groan sounded from behind her.

"_Chyort... voz'mi,_" snarled Zharov, rolling over and sitting up in one brutal movement. Violet spared a glance for him; there was blood on his face along with the rage. He evidently hadn't been fast enough to avoid the blow to the head that had come with the helicopter's violent fall. "What the _deirymo_ happened?"

"Don't know," said Violet emotionlessly, mind clicking over a list of possible components. "The rotors went dead, but there was enough warning for the pilots -"

They both looked at each other in that instant, and said in unison: "_Electro-magnetic pulse._"

"Sort the gear out," said Zharov in his sergeant's voice. It brooked zero disobeying. "I am going to check on the pilots."

Violet's body worked on automatic, separating the gear, as her mind looked over their future itinerary. They were to land at Noril'sk, an industrial Soviet-era city to swap helicopters and then to head south-west, still with Zharov (the Russians evidently weren't keen on an unmonitored American agent in the country.) Something, or more likely someone, had stopped them getting that far.

There was a muffled "_Nu ti dajosh!_" from the pilot's cabin and Zharov climbed back into the main cabin, fury emanating around him like a perceptible aura. Violet looked at him, but never stopped sorting the gear out.

"They got a radio message telling them to change course, that there was important military traffic coming along the direct line to Noril'sk, and to dogleg around the central Siberian plateau. And they were told that we knew about the course change. _Sooka sin pizdogreez!_"

Violet didn't even need to consult her internal map, and the suspicion of the 'new orders' inherent in Zharov's voice filled in the blanks.

"That must have brought us within five miles of the target site."

"Three. Someone down there knew we were coming, hacked the radio, brought us here. They sent out an EMP to knock out the electronic systems of the helicopter to take us down. What a _svoloch_."

Violet was becoming used to the idea that every time Zharov slipped into Russian he was swearing. It was, particularly in the circumstances, a good language to be angry in.

The two pilots, Russian soldiers she hadn't been introduced to, clambered unevenly to the main body of the helicopter with them. "_Polniy pidzets_," said one sullenly, taking his helmet off to show dark hair cropped into a crewcut. Zharov rounded on him instantly.

"Speak English! We are all in this together, including Agent Violet! And as far as I know, you are not trained to _give up_! Now, Pilot Andropov, what are the statistics for where we are?"

Seeming to pull himself together, Andropov responded with a clear "One hundred and ninety miles approximately from Noril'sk, sir, with outside temperature of negative sixteen degrees Celsius. Original target located north-east by two miles, sir. Permission to speak... uh, the word, it means... freely? Sir?" Zharov gave a brief, terse nod. Andropov stood slightly more at ease and said with a blunt frankness, "We're in _pidzets_."

Violet didn't have to guess as to what _that_ one meant. Her Russian wasn't great, but swearwords had a presence in any language, especially with Andropov's pronounced Russian accent. Like Zharov, Andropov's English was good (if accented, especially on the vowels), but he appeared to have a mastery of contractions that Zharov did not. Who, now that the initial rage had passed, seemed to be looking at things with a much more analytical eye. His gaze caught Violet's, who nodded very slightly. She knew what he was thinking. He was a soldier and so was she, after a fashion.

"The gear, Agent... do you have a last name? No? I will continue to call you Agent Violet, then, but excuse me if I do not invite you to call me Aleksei. Is it all there?"

"Yes, both mine and yours. But have the pilots got gear for the low temperatures?"

Zharov shook his head. "They were not meant to go further than Noril'sk."

Violet fished out her emergency rucksack from where it had fallen against the wall of the helicopter. She tossed it to the pilot called Andropov, who caught it clumsily and with a confused look. It was her emergency pack with all the spare thermal things; tent, food, and so on. And a spare radio. _That hopefully won't have been taken out by the blast_, Violet thought. A similar thought was extended to the contents of her own, personal pack that she had brought with her.

Zharov had taken off his shirt and was pulling on his base layers, seemingly unmindful of the sub-zero temperatures that were beginning to creep through the helicopter now that its engines, and therefore its heaters, were off. Violet began to search through her pile of gear for her insulating layers. Andropov threw her another confused look, and passed the rucksack to his co-pilot.

"Where are you going?"

"We," said Violet as she pulled on her first fleece layer, "are going to complete the mission."

--I--

Sergeant Aleksei Zharov was by no means an easily frightened man, and he was well aware of this. However, the picture presented to him this morning of a slight, purple-eyed girl with the cold and unfeeling eyes of a killer had made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. There was something not quite right about her and he'd resolved to stay as far away as possible from her. He'd seen eyes like hers before. When he was a young boy, he'd helped out in the café his mother had run, him and a few brothers. One day a man had come in wearing a longish, dark-grey double-breasted coat with red shoulder boards and collar badges. He also wore a completely flat, dead expression, an absence of any emotion is his dark eyes.

Despite his fear, young Aleksei had gone up to take him to a table, but unusually, his mother beat him to it. She bade him stand to one side as she escorted the man to a quiet table in the corner of the room. She disappeared a moment later and returned with a glass of whiskey. The good stuff, stuff his father drank, not the cheap rotgut that they served everyone else.

He'd noticed, when the man raised his hand to drink, that there were odd scars running about the back of his hands. And he was missing two fingers on that hand. The people around him talked very quietly, conversations of few words. Aleksei had run into the kitchen, where his mother was making pelmeny, and asked her who he was.

He'd learned that the man had returned from the Soviet-Afghan war, where he had "endured terrible, terrible things". His mother had refused to speak any more about it and, when the man had left, had also refused payment.

The respect wasn't about fear, he'd learned a few years later, despite the man's frightening countenance. It was about sorrow, and pity, which was somehow worse. That the man had suffered something people would not even talk about made Zharov feel like he'd met a ghost – the people of his community were not taking care of a survivor, they were looking after their dead.

In a way, the man _was_ dead. A few years after the encounter, the man simply disappeared. Maybe he'd realised it, too.

Violet's eyes were the same as that soldier's. She wasn't nearly as far gone, though. Her movements were looser, even through her carefulness. This made her easier to talk to, knowing that she wasn't a ghost like the man before her, and she _was_ easy to talk to. She wasn't cocky like the young new recruits with their shiny insignia, shiny eyes and shiny guns that had never fired a shot outside of practice. She wasn't overeager, or arrogant, or bloodthirsty. Zharov found this a pleasant change from the new recruits, who were tiresome and self-important like the youngsters he had to train. She was serious, deathly so; as cold as the taiga, as harsh as the taiga, and quite probably as deadly. She seemed as silent as the taiga, too. She spoke only when spoken to and sometimes not even then, but Zharov got the impression that this wasn't so much a mark of respect as her choosing that she had decided not to speak.

Violet didn't look like she belonged in the taiga, though, however much she might resemble it. She would always look a little bit foreign with all that black hair and ivory skin, and her silver scar made her stand out all the more. But, fully kitted out in a white arctic outer coat plus all her gear underneath it, she looked like she could learn to fit in there. Zharov found himself idly wondering if she could live in the snowy taiga purely because the marrow in her bones seemed to be frozen already. The taiga would pose no challenge to someone so cold, and yet so alive.

His own gear felt a little strange, although it was simply Violet's gear designed for a man. There was the base layers, the insulation layers, with white waterproof outside pants tucked into his boots, a white downy overcoat with the hood pulled over his hatted head and shaded snow goggles. The idea behind _this_ assemblage of gear was apparently that it could provide camouflage if needed. His briefing had also inexplicably included the phrase "and you would look maahhvelous in Moscow, dear, white is _all_ the rage this season."

He wasn't quite sure he'd understood that bit.

Now he was stood outside, surveying the serene and silent, brightly-lit and deadly horizon before him when a similarly-bedecked figure clambered with surprising grace out of the door and slid down the side of the fallen helicopter. Moving swiftly over the snow on her white snowshoes, she joined him at his side.

"I've given the radio to the pilots, showed them how to work it. They're to keep calling for help on the American-designated frequency until they get a response, then to give them our co-ordinates and wait for us to get back."

For a moment, Zharov's civic pride was stung. "The _American_ frequency?"

"Whoever took us down knew the Russian ones. It's better to be safe."

Grudgingly, Zharov accepted her point. He produced his compass, held it firmly in one thickly-gloved hand, and pointed north-east.

"The target is that way." Violet looked at him for a moment and nodded, and Zharov couldn't decide to be relieved because her eyes were so thoroughly masked by the goggles or wary because now he couldn't tell what she was looking at. "How far did the pilots say we are from the target?"

"Two miles, as the crow flies. How long will that take over snow?"

"Between an hour and two, depending on our speed and the topography of the land. Every mile is worth two out here."

Zharov glanced to his left to see Violet staring out over the snow-covered ground with its well-spaced coniferous trees. Still the taiga, but not quite the snowy wastelands of the tundra. A fine line that they were treading, a line that could they could easily fall to either side of.

Zharov spared a moment to wonder what (or who), exactly, he was thinking such a phrase about.

They set out.

--I--

Violet had never used snowshoes before, but she picked up the technique fairly quickly. It was still something of a challenge for her shorter legs to keep up with Zharov's, who strode over the snow as if he had walked on nothing else his whole life. And speaking of snow, the gear Edna had provided was surprisingly warm; Violet had expected to feel the residues of cold in her fingers and toes (at the very least), but the efficiency of the material meant that the only cold part of her was her nose and cheeks, exposed to the raw, subzero temperatures of central Siberia.

They had been walking steadily for an hour now. Zharov stopped walking and held up a hand, indicating Violet to draw nearer to him. His other hand was rummaging in one of the pockets of his coat. It emerged holding a silver slab. It took a moment for Violet to realise it was chocolate. Zharov snapped the bar expertly in half and handed her a section, unwrapping his own. "The fat, the sugar, the carbohydrates... you will need them if we are to stay out here much longer. You are too skinny. You cannot keep going for long in this cold."

Violet was tempted to make a comment about the fact that _Zharov_ was one to talk. She felt it would be too confrontational, however, to rebuke the man who currently held her life in his compass and hands.

So instead she bit into the chocolate. After a few bites she remembered why she didn't eat it anymore; the aftertaste was strange, bitter, sickly. She forced herself to finish her section, though, and as soon as Zharov had finished his they continued to move on. Despite the aftertaste that still lingered unpleasantly about her mouth, she felt better for the chocolate; more energetic, sharper, more aware. This might have been why, fifteen minutes or so later, she bade Zharov to stop.

He turned and looked at her, knowing better than to ask why they weren't moving. Violet was staring intently at a tree not ten yards away from where they stood, holding herself with a stillness and a focus that implied deep concentration. After about sixty seconds of contemplation she walked past Zharov another few paces, crouched down, and gently brushed the snow away from a large block set just above the ground. Zharov made no comment as he crouched down next to her and helped her clear the snow from it. It was a cold metal cube roughly three feet square, perhaps twelve inches high. The snow had covered it well, making it look like part of the landscape, but no amount of snow could have blurred the too-sharp edges from close inspection. This was especially clear with the way the tree's shadow, at which Violet had been staring so intently, followed the contour of the subterranean shape. Around the other side of the block was a large metal grille. Violet knelt down next to it and felt a breeze of cool air – cool, but noticeably warmer than the air of winter Siberia.

"Ventilation," she said quietly. Zharov knelt to look at it properly, and sized it with his hands. Violet took stock of it carefully. "No guards," she added, and she knew the oddity of this had struck Zharov as well.

The ventilation grate was twelve inches high, as tall as the block, and about two-and-a-half feet wide. It was large enough to admit a person, provided they strip off all outer gear and didn't mind going in blind. Headfirst wouldn't even be an option, the dangers were so unknown, so a person would have to wriggle through and hope it didn't narrow too much further down.

Her eyes caught Zharov's similarly-masked ones, and they shared another of those wordless moments of communication. It wasn't a mutual agreement, however.

"You can_not_ be serious," said Zharov flatly. "It could be a trap. There could be defence mechanisms. You could get stuck, you might not be able to climb back up, it could lead to an incinerator, _anything_."

Violet gave him a flat look in return. He seemed to pause for a moment, scanning her face, and to her surprise didn't push the issue. Instead, he rubbed his forehead with a gloved palm and sighed.

"There will be no persuading you," he said, more of a statement than a question. "You intend to go blindly into enemy territory with no communication, with -"

Wordlessly, Violet held up two walkie-talkie headsets. She _knew_ they'd come in handy when she'd packed her own rucksack, experience telling her not to rely on Edna and Agent Dicker to provide everything. They'd been switched off when the EMP blast had hit, meaning they should still be okay. "We'll need codenames," she supplemented. "Just in case the transmissions are intercepted. 'Sergeant Zharov' might be a bit of a giveaway."

Zharov looked like he was trying hard not to glare at her, which made Violet wonder why he was holding back. Finally, he took a headset with a sigh, briefly pushing back his hood to fix it in place on his head.

"You do know we have already completed our mission?" he said with a growl, fixing her with an exasperated stare. "This is suicide."

Violet gave him a flat look. "I'm not a suicide, I'm a cynic," she said, unzipping her coat and letting it fall to the crunchy, snow-laden earth. Zharov's gaze seemed to up a notch in ferocity.

"Why do you insist on doing this when you may be killed?"

Something dark and bloody flashed across Violet's mind at that, just for a second – old remembrances the colour of ichor, warped memories split like scars, fault lines in her notable stability that had secretly fissured down into her control. In a single moment of unnoticeable strength, she pulled all the cracks in her mind together, swiftly and brutally. Welding them together with her iron sense of self-domination (yet again), she simply straightened up and looked right at Zharov. The effect was slightly spoiled by her shivering. The cold _bit_, like an animal that hadn't been fed.

Zharov sighed again, knelt down directly in front of the grating, and produced a screwdriver kit from one of his many pockets. Violet watched on as he tried different heads in the screws on the grating, about half-way through his kit finding one that worked. He carefully pulled out the screws at the top of the grating and pushed them next to the corner of the block. He then unscrewed the bottom ones halfway, replaced his screwdriver from whatever unfathomable pocket depths from which he had procured it, and gave Violet a nod. She continued to strip off her outer garments until she was in her base layers, shivering almost violently from the cold. She slipped her headset on over her hat and Zharov pulled the grating from the block. Moving quickly, hyper-aware that even a few more minutes in the sub-zero temperatures of the taiga could spell hypothermia and frostbite, she gripped the top of the block with both hands and swung her feet (now only clad in those super-socks) into the shaft. They hit a sloping wall; the shaft headed down at an angle, downwards and towards the direction her back was currently facing. Pulling a headtorch from a pocket and fixing it to her forehead, she was about to twist herself around to fit in when Zharov spoke up once more.

"If they find you, they could probably find the others, too. Are you willing to risk their lives – my life – on this venture?"

That was a below-the-belt shot, but Violet didn't let her face show how it had registered. _Fair point_, part of her wanted to say, but instead she fixed Zharov with a steely stare.

"You're soldiers, Sergeant Aleksei Zharov. You can defend yourselves."

Violet turned back to the shaft, her shivering now quite pronounced, and slipped her snow goggles from her face. She squinted for a moment, her eyes almost overwhelmed by the sheer, white brightness of the taiga, before she slid into the shaft with one smooth movement. She was quick, despite the numbness in her extremities. She turned to lie on her back, feet braced on either side of the ribbed duct, facing the entrance. Below her, the slide downwards yawned into the darkness. She glanced up at Zharov, who knelt by the opening, took her goggles from her, and then raised his own so he could look at her properly.

"I will wait here so long as we remain in contact," he told her gruffly, his voice an odd duality as it reached her free ear, and came through electronically in the other via her headset. "If I lose contact or you tell me to leave, I will do so. I will return to the helicopter and await help there. I will not risk the lives of my men if I can avoid it."

Violet nodded. That was a good choice. Zharov put the grating back on the entrance by balancing it on the two half-unscrewed screws at the bottom. Then, to her surprise, he took it off again.

"I will assume you know what you are doing," he growled, "And not ask you how you will get out again." Violet nodded once.

"Come back alive," he growled after a pause. There was no sentiment in it. It was an order.

Violet nodded once more and turned her eyes downwards as Zharov put the grating back on.

--I--

Zharov stepped back to admire his handiwork. By balancing the grating on two screws, it gave the casual viewer the impression that nothing was amiss (aside from the disturbed snow) and also allowed Violet to get back out that way if she so wished.

"Are you there?" came the somewhat Zen phrase through the headset.

"Loud and clear, Miss Taiga," said Zharov, still staring at the grate. He moved to sit down under a tree a few yards away from the block.

"Going down, Mr. Kasatka," said Violet, and then silence. Zharov allowed a small grin to touch the corner of his lips; when he had first met the girl, he couldn't resist showing off the helicopter that he'd fixed and subsequently started their ill-fated voyage in. 'Kasatka' had been its type.

He made himself comfortable and settled in for the wait, but his mind kept returning, over and over, to that one instant.

_Why do you insist on doing this when you may very well be killed?_

It was a simple question. But Violet – that young taiga of a girl – had looked at him with an expression that told him very clearly that she didn't care. She was young. Painfully so. Zharov wondered, just for a moment, what had happened to give her killer's eyes and a half-formed death wish.

* * *

_To be continued._

* * *

If you signed in and reviewed, I sent you a reply. For those who didn't, I'll reply here.

**KNick**: My first review! Thanks! Glad you like my interpretation of Dicker. He was fun to write. As for the angst, I'm just concerned it's gone a bit overboard in later chapters... heh, it probably hasn't, but I'm still worried all the same.


	3. iii

Let me have my own way,  
Let others promulge the laws, I will make no account of the law,  
Let others praise eminent men and hold up peace, I hold up agitation and conflict,  
I praise no eminent man, I rebuke to his face the one that was thought most worthy.  
_- Walt Whitman, 'Myself and Mine'_

* * *

The cold in the shaft was so biting as to cause Violet serious worry. She'd been in the cold long enough to have progressed to stage one hypothermia, and was very aware of the brief warming sensation that would herald the progression to stage two.

Shivering, breath shuddering from her body and condensing in the beam of her head torch, she lessened the pressure her hands and feet were exerting on the sides of the metal duct. She slid downwards smoothly, the descent controlled by her fierce domination over her muscles – an authority that she estimated would last another couple of minutes before the cold finally pushed her into stage two hypothermia and its resulting lack of muscle co-ordination.

Fast. She had to be fast.

And clever.

It was getting colder as she went down, against all common sense, and Violet knew that she couldn't continue on like this without permanent frostbite. So she braced her legs against the walls of the shaft, took several deep breaths to oxygenate her brain, and wrapped an airtight bubble around herself. She paid special attention to the density of the bubble around her feet and hands, allowing malleability of the shield force to maintain control of her descent, and continued downwards. It was a little uncomfortable as the shield bounced over the small ripples in the duct which marked where sections had been welded together, but her body's seriously-depleted heat production began to catch up and heat the interior of the bubble to, if not a comfortable level, a more tolerable one.

There was enough air in the bubble for perhaps twenty seconds' worth of breathing, but Violet didn't want to exhaust it yet. She could hold her breath for a minute, maybe thirty seconds beyond that if she was desperate, so she would save the air inside for when she really needed it. Besides, the bubble was doing its job. The air was already beginning to be heated by Violet's slender form and even though her arms, hands and feet were numb she still had basic muscle control. It wasn't getting any colder, that was the important thing, especially as there was frost forming in patches all around the inside of her shield where a little moisture that rose from her body had stuck. Due to the dryness of Siberian winter, the shaft itself and the outside of her protective shield had no ice on them, something she was magnificently thankful for. She was also hyper-aware of the way her hands were now completely numb (if dry under the gloves), meaning she now had to hurry before frostbite set in permanently.

There was something ahead. Violet frowned. Bracing her arms and legs differently to stop her progression as she freed one frozen hand to awkwardly switch off her head torch, she peered down the shaft.

There was a blue glow about thirteen feet further down the shaft. Violet couldn't see what caused it, as it illuminated the fact that there was vertical drop down. Curious, still holding her breath and within her oxygen limits, she continued going down.

Violet could see the blue glow get brighter and brighter as she approached the drop, and she squinted to see it better through the shifting, frost-coated haze of her shield as she reached its edge. The drop down was about ten feet – she could see some kind of bottom, or end of the tunnel with help from the blue glow – and the tunnel itself had roughly the same dimensions as the sloping shaft she was in now. The blue glow itself was a kind of very narrow blue band of light that joined two sections of the square duct together, about halfway down. Its luminescence was incredibly bright and it was only the frost in her shield that protected Violet's eyes.

Violet carefully edged herself out over the drop, conforming the shield around her numbed feet and hands, moving slowly as so not to fall. At the same time, the frost inside her bubble got thicker and thicker as moisture from her body filled the airtight space and the air outside cooled at a scarily fast rate. Violet took a moment to consider that outside temperature; it had to be at least minus thirty centigrade now, way beyond any tolerance for the cold she might have had. The air in her bubble, however, was considerably warmer. The ice above her head had begun to melt a little, sending the occasional drip of ice-cold water down the back of her neck. The temperature in her bubble was now about fifteen degrees centigrade, she estimated. She also guessed she had about twenty seconds before the need for air would become overwhelming.

With this in mind, she braced herself and carefully began to manoeuvre down the vertical drop. The going was slow and Violet's lungs began to send out sandpapery warnings – she knew her limits, but she hadn't banked on such hard physical exercise using up her oxygen supplies. She lost her air on a violent warning from her brain, and panted harshly two or three times before securing another double-lungful of air.

She threw a glance downwards to the ominous icy blue glow of a line, through the ice thinly coating her shield, and knew she couldn't go anywhere but down. She wouldn't have enough air or warmth to get back up again. So, when she was right next to the blue line, she barely spared a thought to the dangers and went through it.

There was a violent jolting sensation. All at once, the frost inside her bubble snapped into millions of pieces, raining small ice shards down on her head despite the bubble's warmer interior. The only thing that kept Violet from dissolving the bubble was her own self-will and control, iron-strong after years and years of practise. Exhaling heavily, she sucked in a deep breath, not sure how much longer she could keep this up for before the carbon dioxide levels in the bubble were high enough to render her unconscious.

But she was through that strange blue glow, and the end of the shaft was about four feet below her. Odd things were happening, though, as she switched her head-torch back on. The ice that had collected in tiny, pristine splinters on the bottom of her bubble was melting quickly.

The need for air was growing strong again and so she kept falling that controlled descent, until she fell out of a hole at the bottom of the duct into a small, square, metal room. On instinct she dissolved the bubble and sucked in several great lungfuls of air. Because of this, it took a moment for the oddity of this strange room to sink in.

It was _warm_. A little above normal room-temperature warm, maybe twenty-five or -six degrees centigrade. Within seconds, her fingers and toes began to throb in a painful unison that informed her this rise of temperature wasn't just her imagination making the transition into stage two hypothermia easier. There was also a very faint breeze of air flowing past her – evidently, some kind of ventilation unit was responsible for drawing air from different shafts into this main unit and up the ventilation chimney (now she knew that was what it was). There would be another ventilation shaft somewhere else responsible for drawing air in.

Violet raised one screaming hand to her forehead with a calmness and precision that telegraphed no pain on her part, and adjusted the beam of her head torch to shine brighter in the dark space.

What she thought of as a small, metal room was little more than a box. She knelt on the floor of it and her head just brushed its ceiling, if she hunched her back. Left to right, it could not have been more than ten feet long. Directly above and slightly to the left was the square metal opening to the shaft above, the cold blue light illuminating it. She spared a thought for the strange blue line-light again, deciding that it was some kind of refrigeration mechanism that chilled the air before sending it onwards. Not entirely efficient, though – the metal of the shaft communicated the heat upwards. That was how she had gotten here in the first place – that tiny, almost-missed heat signature.

Looking around, Violet discovered the box to have several other similarly-sized openings. One was in the floor a foot from where she knelt and went straight down. Another was in the wall to her left, and there was another in the wall to her right.

There was light coming in from the one to her left, along with a faint murmur that sounded like many voices talking quietly, all at once.

"I'm in," she whispered into her headset, aware of her previous radio silence. There was a pause, and crackly but still discernible "Good" came through.

"I think I'm in the building's ventilation," she breathed, careful to lisp ever so slightly. The hissing noise of the letter S was the sound that carried the furthest distance. "I see light. I'm going to check it out."

"Okay," said Zharov's distant voice through the headset. "Try not to die, Taiga."

"Roger that, Kasatka," she whispered, and crawled to her left. To her surprise, there was no dust on the floor of the unit – surely some kind of residue would collect from the rooms below, especially as this was outflow ventilation? Either they had a very strict maintenance shift or a very clever way of stopping dust from blocking the airways.

Reaching the hole in the wall of the box, she stuck her head out of it. At fist glance, it led to what looked like some kind of room. Then she fed the image through her logic filters and realised it was some kind of mass air circulation system – the room below was evidently very warm, judging by the sudden rise of temperature to just this side of uncomfortableness. Her hands, feet and nose throbbed a little harder.

Clambering through, she stood and surveyed what she saw.

She stood at one end of a giant wedge of a space. It was just tall enough to admit her five foot seven inches' worth of height, with a couple of inches to spare toward the flat ceiling. The floor sloped gently upwards from where she stood to meet the ceiling, about thirty feet away. The space itself was about fifteen feet across where Violet was stood, widening even further where the floor rose up to meet the ceiling.

And on the floor were two foot-wide rectangular holes in the floor that ran the length of this odd room, one of each side of the irregular, sloping floor. The one on the left was the one she was nearest to, having crawled into this space from the direct left it. There was another on the right of the space with another exit hole. Violet could feel warm air being drawn into the metal box she'd just left and was fairly certain the same was happening at the other exit hole. Elementary physics, she reminded herself – hot air rises, cold air sinks. Hot air was being drawn off to cool the room, and so cool air must have been pumped into the room below her from a lower level.

Curious as to what activity in the room below could generate such heat and noise of industrial activity, Violet carefully made her way over to the slit in the floor nearest her and, with even more care, peered down.

From her position, the lowest point on the oddly-shaped floor of the ventilation space, it was easily thirty feet down to the floor of the room below. The room below was _massive_, with its rising ceiling and widening walls. And it was full of people.

Directly below her were men and women working at computers and worksurfaces at rows of desks. In front of these rows, almost touching the huge back wall (on which was a variety of diagrams and pictures), was a huge semi-circular desk at which even more people were working. Then she realised she'd been mistaken – what she had taken for a huge wall with diagrams on was, in fact, a huge screen. There were graphs and charts moving about on it, pictures, images, clips, a kind of dance of information that was both elegant and efficient. Violet stared at it, trying to digest this impossible image and ascertain its purpose.

It was... complicated. Amazingly so. The data kept shifting but it wasn't random, there was method in the madness. It was being arranged into a pattern. Some items were deleted, occasionally new ones would appear in their places, and some items overlapped each other. This was somebody's brain in motion, trying to process everything on a screen easily fifty feet by sixty feet.

This was the central nervous system of some great corporate beast. And judging by the names and figures flashing on and off the giant screen, a giant corporate beast with fingers _everywhere_. Biochemical research, GM studies, stocks, shares, technology investments (both scientific and military)... whoever owned this had their fingers on the pulse of the world's economy in almost every quarter, and probably owned a fair share of its heart. Information was bought and sold on this screen at every second, and the bustle of people below testified to its upkeep; but the commotion below, like the information on the screen, was patterned. There was a perceptible flow and ebb of movement, people shifting as though controlled by a higher force. Although, oddly for this kind of situation, there were no guards in the mobile multitudes.

Violet focused on the dark blue floor below. It didn't take her long to spot a congregation of people, a loose knot of workers in the space provided by the semi-circular desk. People were coming and going from this group all the time, but the size remained roughly the same. It took Violet another moment to recognise its fixed point – a single person in the midst of this knot about whom the entire tangled web revolved.

Violet leant a little closer to the edge of the grate, trying to bring the figure down there into sharper focus. They were... male, by the looks of it, or an extremely tall and broad-shouldered woman. The hair was short and loose, a confused mix of blonde and red. He was being handed documents, handing them back again, gesturing seemingly randomly, apparently talking to at least five people at the same time whilst glancing up at the shifting figures on that cinema of a screen. Violet found herself feeing the first faint stirrings of admiration. This operation, whatever its purpose, was extremely well-organised and well-conducted, and the central figure down there appeared to be its brain, judging by people's reaction to him. He took an active interest in the workings of the base, and indeed seemed to be its most essential part. He was running this place with a deadly efficiency, and yet there was an atmosphere of contented workers. There was no fear here, none at all, an ambience Violet usually associated with underground operations.

Looking down again, she saw that the boss-figure was beginning to move away from that central position in front of the screen, south of Violet's current position high in the metal rafters of the room – a direction which ran right under the metal ventilation box she'd been in only moments before.

Violet made a quick decision. She crawled back through to the small metal box, out of the wedge-shaped circulation system she'd been peering down from. Putting one hand to her headset, she very quietly said, "There is something huge going on down here."

There was pause before Zharov replied.

"How big?"

"Massive. Judging by their databanks –" Violet's thoughts flashed to the huge screen and the man who seemed to be conducting it all, "– I'd say global."

Zharov's silence this time was a little longer. "Are you going to investigate it further?"

"Yes. I think I need to find out what's happening here. No _legal_ operation would need to bury themselves underground in the middle of an unreachable location without the knowledge of the country's government."

"Fine. As soon as you find out what you need to, come straight back up."

"Affirmative. If you don't hear back from me in the next fifteen minutes, get out of here."

"Agreed. Good luck."

Turning swiftly with an agility and a lightness that would have surprised anyone viewing her movements in the small, confined space, she peered down the ventilation duct in the floor of the box, phasing out as she did so. It was another shaft that sloped down and away from her, only about six feet long, ending in a grate that appeared to be secured by nothing more than gravity. It led into a room, well-lit and fairly busy. From what Violet could see, it appeared to be some kind of corridor, or crossroads – there were people moving in four directions at once.

She placed her radio headset on the floor of the metal box (aware that it didn't phase out as she did) and quickly stripped off her socks and gloves. Tucking them into a pocket, she slid down the metal shaft until she was kneeling on the grating. It felt strong enough to hold her meagre weight, but she stayed deathly still nonetheless.

_This_ duct was easier to navigate than the one she'd come down to get here. The ribbed metal walls were just warm to the touch, telegraphing the heat generated in the room below, and were easier to grasp with bare feet. Her extremities weren't frozen, providing a better grip. Violet much preferred to do stealth work barefoot, whenever possible. She felt more confident, more sure, more in control.

Toes gripping the metal squares of the grille, she focused her gaze downwards, waiting.

Her guess was proven correct when, thirty seconds later, the density of the people in the room increased dramatically. Crouching down as far as she could, she tried to get a better look at this mythical controller-figure she'd spied in the HQ-style room.

He strode into her limited field of vision and then stopped, turning slightly to face someone who had approached him and was now talking urgently in mildly Russian-accented English.

Violet's self-control was never more apparent than when hit with a nasty surprise. Her lack of reaction was legendary within the NSA, her ability to adapt and form a counter-attack her biggest weapon; so the shock she felt on this sight was never realised but quickly packed away, and transformed into another strain of grim determination to find out _what the holy hell was going on here_.

The hair of the man below wasn't red, or blonde, but a fiery shade of auburn tempered lightly with ash-grey: that of a fire just banking down for a slow and cosy burn. It was cut stylishly short and appeared to be in its normal, natural shape, rather than gelled up – a few strands spilled into his eyes in a cheerfully haphazard manner. His eyes were calm and blue, relaxed and easygoing, without a hint of malice. His mouth was turned up at the corners in a faint shadow of a pleased, content expression, rather than a smirk or sneer. It was a face Violet could recognise with or without the identity-concealing shape of a mask; his features had been burned into her mind years ago as an example of her first real, true fear.

Syndrome had changed a lot in the last eight years.

Gone was the pretentious suit of a man who wished himself hero; gone was the self-satisfied air, but not the aura of complete control. Now he wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, no tie, worklike black pants and shoes. His face was relaxed, calmer, the expression of a man doing exactly what he wants to do. It was a far cry from the face Violet remembered; for a year or so after their first encounter encounter she'd often woken with it in front of her at three a.m. in the morning. But then she'd remembered him dead, like so many other people had remembered him, and gone back to sleep. After a while the nightmares had faded, as had the terror. Within another year she never thought of him.

But now he was here, as large as life and twice as confusing, with easy features and a casual demeanour that suggested not a worry in the world, despite his evident position of head of this corporation.

Violet didn't waste time wondering how he had survived when the world thought him dead. There was much more pressing issues at hand. _Now_ she knew who was involved, now she knew who was masterminding this entire operation, it was evident that this spelled disaster for _somebody_. Syndrome was not famous for doing good and charitable deeds, and the evidence that he had his fingers in quite a lot of the world's scientific and technology-based pies did not bode well at all.

Single-mindedness, sharper and colder that the temperatures above, spread through her. The sensation was not dissimilar to adrenaline, but with more composure. It charged her from her nervous system outwards, honed curves and jagged ends of blue-white light, loading up the marrow of her bones with a careful excitement and a pure focused energy. It gave her a measure of temper and strength she might not have had previously.

Features and limb steady as a rock, she crunched down even smaller on the grate, one ear cocked toward Syndrome, trying to pick up what he was saying.

"...yes, yes, as long as we're in by next week... no, take that down the the statistics department... Hmm, have you informed the stocks people? No? Drop a copy off downstairs then. Hey! Nikolaevsky!"

Violet peered a little further left, trying to see who Syndrome had hailed in favour of those already clustered around him. A tall, burly man with very dark brown hair, dressed in dark charcoal-grey armour and with the rank stripes of a commander gently pushed his way through the crowd. People stood back respectfully to make room for him, but Violet noted once again that there was no fear involved. The man brought himself to attention in front of Syndrome.

"Reporting, sir." His English was flawless, but his Russian accent was extremely pronounced.

"Any more news on our earlier problem?"

"The helicopter is down, sir, I watched it myself on the radar. They crashed approximately two miles south-west from here, from full speed onto the ground. The chance of survival was very slim."

Syndrome nodded, seeming very satisfied. "Nevertheless, I'd like to dispatch a few guards, kitted out properly of course, to go double-check. If they really were heading here, I'm betting they've got gear for the taiga and are good at surviving."

_You have_ no _idea,_ thought Violet.

"Armed, sir?"

"As always. Standard rifles. See to it."

"Yes, sir."

Violet's brain made the connection instantly as Syndrome and the guard called Nikolaevsky headed in different directions, in Syndrome's case followed by that crowd of people. Moving up the shaft with a silence born of focus, she picked up her headset.

"Kasatka, get out of here _now_. They're sending men with guns to the helicopter, and you have to warn the pilots."

"Roger," came the reply, and then silence. And in that silence, she heard the faint sound of a warning bell from the HQ-room. A dread certainty settling low in her stomach, Violet moved through into the HQ-room's ventilation wedge again, and looked down through the opening. At the same time, Zharov's voice came though her headset.

"I have a problem," he said evenly.

"They found you," said Violet flatly, looking down at the desk around which more and more people were crowding.

"There is a man with a gun pointed at me, yes."

"What's he doing?"

"Choking on his cigarette."

The situation was getting steadily worse. Then she saw Syndrome stride into the room below her at a fast pace, push his way to the computer emitting the warning noise, and then turn quickly to give orders to the people nearby.

"The guard has found the disturbed snow around the ventilation grate," remarked Zharov evenly. "I think it would be fair to say this situation is _khrenoten_."

_So they know someone has gotten into the base_, thought Violet. _And they're aware that at least one other person knows its – and my – location. But they don't know I'm a super, just that I'm resourceful enough to have gotten in without tripping any sensors. This still gives me an advantage._

Below Violet, new people were entering the HQ-room. They were well-armoured guards, charcoal-grey uniforms, clear visors on their helmets. The style was horribly familiar to Violet, but she pushed the memories back. Focus. _Focus_.

"Ah, the backup's here," said Zharov pleasantly. "Looks like I will get to see the inside of the base after all."

There was the crackling noise of static, and then silence.

Carefully, Violet placed the headset on the floor of the chamber, and focused her attention downwards once more. The workers had stopped all activity and were listening to Syndrome, who had stood on a desk so that everyone could see him.

"...intruder," he was saying, "somewhere in the base. So be vigilant. Keep an eye out for things that are out of the ordinary. If you see something, radio one of the guards. If you come into contact with the intruder, hit an alarm button. Do _not_ put yourself at risk."

_That_ didn't sound like Syndrome at all.

"If you can hurt, wound or kill the intruder, do so."

_That_ did.

"As of now, all security protocols are activated. Movement in the base will require your keycard at every doorway. Do not, I repeat, do NOT let anyone else use your keycard, or follow you through a doorway."

Right – invisibility was called for, but with extra caution. She couldn't let anyone in the base get the idea she was a super. It was just as well Zharov didn't know.

Violet took a moment to figuratively sit back on her heels. She'd done all the unplanned rushing-in she needed to for the day; now was the time for careful mapping-out. This situation had gone from cautious to catastrophic in the space of five minutes. Her next few moves would have to be carefully considered. _Very_ carefully considered.

It was possibly something of a relief to know that her inherent talents lent her a degree of caution that Syndrome would not be expecting...

* * *

_To be continued._


	4. iv

_Yeah, the haircut's hot, but this has gotta stop – good shoes won't save you this time._  
- Can't Catch Tomorrow: Lostprophets

* * *

The last few minutes had passed in a completely blackened fashion, but Zharov was just thankful that they'd only blindfolded him and tied his hands in front of him. A man with unbound legs and unrestricted arm movement had a lot of freedom in tight circumstances, providing he picked those circumstances carefully. Whoever it was that had found him, called for backup and then trussed up his hands without once checking his prisoner for weapons or waiting for said backup ought to have been shot by his commanding sergeant. And this was Zharov's _professional_ opinion. His personal one was much more violent. Whoever this guard was, he disgraced the name of soldiers everywhere. In fact, judging from the man's inept behaviour, he was betting more along the lines of 'paid crony'. The guard evidently hadn't had any _military_ training but at least was bright enough to wait for the backup before escorting Zharov into the base.

Which had been a bit of an oddity in itself, blindfolded as he was. He was absolutely sure there had been no doors visible in the scenery around him, but he'd only been led for thirty seconds before walking straight into an elevator that descended with a smooth and startling efficiency. Then he remembered the sparse tree population of the taiga, and supposed that for someone constructing a "massive" underground base, hiding a lift shaft in a tree (fake or hollowed out) would have presented no problem.

His most urgent problem (all things considered) was that the guards he could sense around him did not appear to be as inefficient as the first guard. He had seen the awkward, lined shape of their bodies under their thick arctic padding, and it spoke of tough muscle and solid armour. They had held their guns like they knew what they were doing, not like a rookie nipping outside for a quick smoke. Then had come the blindfold. He'd gone quietly because he knew that any violent protest would have been met with terminal resistance. It was against his nature, but sometime you just had to go with the flow. Besides, given the choice between being dragged semi-conscious into enemy territory and walking calmly with four of his five senses still active, he'd take the smart option.

They went down a little way in the elevator – not far, he guessed. He was marched out, now with a hand on each shoulder. He fought the urge – hard – to shake them off.

The first thing that hit him was that it was _warm_ – ridiculously so for a man accustomed to living in the northern wastes of Russia. There was also a faint susurration of noise, as if many people were passing them by and not saying anything. He was escorted along this corridor for about thirty seconds before making an abrupt left turn and being pushed forward. Zharov didn't allow himself the luxury of stumbling, and sailed the extra momentum easily. There was a pause, a very brief _whummmm_ noise, and then total silence. His hands, still bound, carefully removed his blindfold. He looked around while blinking a few times to dispel the blurriness.

It was a cell. He had figured as much, but it was a cell with the strangest construction he had ever seen. He was stood on a flat square of concrete about six feet by six feet. The walls on the left and right were sheer metal that rose ten feet. There wasn't a back wall; instead, there was a narrowing slope of concrete that stretched about nine feet to a flat, tapered point that housed a single small slot, presumably for ventilation. The metal walls bent inwards to follow the slope.

But why would a cell need ventilation when it apparently had no fourth wall? Where there should have been a wall was simply a rectangle of empty space that led onto a corridor lined with what was either metal or grey linoleum.

Cautiously, Zharov approached this non-existent fourth wall. Straight ahead was another cell, empty, with a construction design identical to his own. Looking right, he saw that there were a few more cells on both sides of the walkway before the grey, dull-shiny corridor resumed with a blue-white wall colouring and light blue carpet. Looking left, he saw that he was in the last cell before the corridor stretched out into a room holding four desks that hugged the walls. There was door in the wall he could see clearest in his limited line of vision. And in the wall adjacent to that, he could just make out the edge of a large, doorless opening in the wall that led into a room, a room so big, with moving pictures –

As he leaned forward out of the strange gap in a room supposedly meant to hold prisoners, his head hit an invisible force and bounced him back into the room. It wasn't a violent push, just a gentle reminder that whoever had designed this cell had one clear purpose: to divide the world into two bits. The inside, and the outside. They had done their job very well.

Zharov backed away from the strange wall and as he did a harried-looking man hustled past whilst deep in conversation with a slightly more relaxed-looking woman. No sound reached him. Zharov thought that one over with a worrying prickly sensation on the back of his neck: no sound meant that the air vibrations created by speech and motion were not touching his ears. Something was blocking their progress. The force-field. And if there was no sound, then there was going to be no air flow, which must have been the purpose of the air vent at the back of the cell.

Having explored every inch of the cell with his eyes, Zharov turned his attention to his roped-together wrists. He knew how to let people bind his hands – crush the fists together and brace the wrists. That meant, should he ever need to shake the ropes off, if he pressed his hands together like he was praying – like so – there was _just_ enough laxity in the ropes to slide them down. (He'd had a very psychotic and slightly odd drill sergeant who had come back from the Cold War with the kind of paranoia normally associated with crack addicts.) Now that his hands were free, he allowed himself the luxury of pulling awkwardly at the neck of his constricting winter gear. The heat in here truly was oppressive. He stripped off the insulating layers until he was clad only in his base layers, and then pushed his unworn clothes into a corner of the cell. He wasn't sure if he'd need them again.

He tried very hard not to interpret the many ways that sentence could be perceived.

Zharov rubbed his wrists where the burn from the rope used had not quite faded and looked around the cell again. He was a little claustrophobic at heart and the cell made him uneasy; he was also so wound up on unused adrenaline and pent-up stress that, when something touched his shoulder and hissed his name, he whipped around and reared his fist back to strike before his brain could register any emotion barring anger.

There was nothing there.

He lowered his fist, hardened eyes glancing at every corner of the cell. There wasn't much space and there wasn't _anywhere_ for a person to hide.

"It's me, Violet," said the voice again. Zharov took a pace back, staring wildly at the empty space.

"Where are you?" he growled.

"In front of you. I understand this is difficult to accept. You were told I have 'special abilities'."

It took Zharov a moment to process this, before a few front pages from American newspapers floated across his recent memory.

"An understatement, I see. Or rather, I do not see. You are a 'super'?"

"Yes."

"How did you get in here? Into the cell?"

"I saw you coming from the ventilation shaft I was in, so I followed you in. The guards know there's a loose cannon in the base but they don't know I have... stealth techniques. Suffice to say that _I can get you out of here_. Your base layers... are they made of the same material mine is?"

"I assume so."

"Good. In a moment, I'm going to take your hand. I need you to back up close to the forcefield and tell me if anyone is coming."

Zharov slowly retreated until he could check in both directions. "It's safe."

Immediately a small, light, fragile-feeling hand slipped into his. He could feel the tendons on the back of her hand rippling. For a man not used to flights of emotion, he felt a moment of strong but very powerful protectiveness – it was his job to protect her, and look how _that_ had turned out. Chasing on the wake of that strange surge was a feeling of guilt: she might be hardened and cold, but she was still painfully young, and she was trying to protect _him_, an extra burden on a pair of shoulders that looked too tired to hold much more. The slenderness of her hand and the bones Zharov felt lifting the surface of her skin testified to this, as did the way he felt like he could crush her fingers with one tolerably determined squeeze.

He felt better for not being able to see her; it hid her eyes, which was something to be thankful for on any occasion.

There was a brief tingle in his palm and when he looked down at his hand he couldn't see it. His entire body froze up in his trained response to shock. Violet must have felt the tension in him.

"I've extended my... special abilities to cover you. Don't let go of my hand or I can't guarantee it'll continue."

"How will this get us out?"

"To anyone outside, this will look like an empty cell that should be occupied. The guards here, while well-equipped and _mostly_ well-trained, aren't instructed in the basic arts of logic and lateral thinking."

"Meaning, little Taiga?"

"Meaning they'll see an empty cell, and enter it to check it out rather than assuming that no-one could have got past such impenetrable defences. The security patrols around here are pretty regular, and they'll be even more so now that you're here. In fact, I'd be surprised if you're not assigned a permanent gua– ah, here he comes." She paused. "And less of the 'little', if you don't mind."

He felt the tug of Violet's hand and moved to press his back against the wall of the cell, eyes on the door.

"Tread carefully," said Violet, and he could hear professionalism in her voice. "Breath gently. We're in luck; it seems to be lunch break or something. I've seen it a lot busier along here."

The guard Violet had spied was indeed approaching. The look on his face when he saw the apparently-empty cell, Zharov thought, was well worth waiting for.

Violet was right. The man reached up to the radio clipped to his shoulder, spoke a rapid series of words, and without taking his eyes from the cell, slapped the palm of his hand onto the wall beside the door. Instantly, the gentle noise of the building filtered back in. Zharov felt Violet's hand slipping him forward and out of the cell as the distracted guard dashed in to run his hands over every part of the wall.

Violet's hand might have been slender, but the sheer strength in it amazed Zharov. She moved without waiting for him to catch up, dragging him into the corridor and to the left. Her grip was like steel and Zharov, unused to moving without a visible reminder of his body, was reduced to relying on spatial awareness alone, something becoming harder now that the corridor was filling with guards. And, striding along in their midst with an expression like thunder, a tall red-haired man with all the bearing and composure of a leader. Instantly, Violet's hand dragged him to the side of the corridor to avoid the leader-man and the loose knot of guards around him. Zharov looked ahead, presumably right through Violet then and through the large doorless entryway he'd glimpsed previously. She had been right. That main room was _massive_. _This_ room was big, busy, more crossroads than enclosed space, and it was rapidly filling up with people. There seemed to be nowhere to go.

"I know that man," whispered Violet's voice in his ear. He turned to look at the redhead who had stalked past them and who was now harassing the guard at their cell's entrance. The guard looked like he was trying to explain himself. "He's dangerous. Don't get too near him." And her hand drew him away again.

They went through the doorway on their left and Zharov caught another glimpse of that giant room again before the were heading away from it, carefully slipping in between the people moving through the corridor. "Where are we going?" he asked, careful to keep his voice low despite the babble of voices all around him.

"Trying to find a hangar. We need some kind of craft. We'll never survive outside like this."

"What about the pilots? Andropov and Gorlovich?"

Violet stopped for a moment. He couldn't see her face, but he fancied she was fighting some kind of internal battle.

"I don't want to leave them," she said at last. "But how can we help them if we don't help ourselves first? Maybe if we can find a 'copter we can get to them before these guards do."

Zharov was instantly angry. These were his _men_ she was talking about, not some kind of expendable machinery.

"_I will not leave my –_"

Instantly, a hand clamped over his mouth and small but very solid body pushed him into the wall of the corridor and out of the way of the pedestrian crush of people. When Violet spoke, it was in a voice as icy as the snow above them, and it was right into his ear.

"_We. Have. No. Choice._ We are _trapped_ in a base run by an evil and highly-intelligent megalomaniac who is very quickly going to figure out that their infiltrator isn't normal. When that happens, he'll start instructing the guards to use heat sensors and we are not hidden from that. No. We're not. So unless we get out of here soon, _he will kill us_. He will have no qualms about it _at all_. This way, we have at least a slim chance of rescuing your men. We will have no chance at all if we are _dead_."

Her voice had never risen above a murmur, and would have been well disguised in the mumbled conversations around them. She'd still managed to spit out the last word with a ferocity that bespoke pure rage. Zharov shook his head free of her hand in one movement.

"Then let's go, little Taiga," he hissed back, and they began to move forward again.

--I--

Violet kept her grip on Zharov's hand just a shade too tight for comfort, despite keeping most of her displeasure with his little outburst locked safely away. She was highly irritated at his lapse in professionalism. He was a solider using a hitherto-unknown stealth technique and he had nearly shouted out in a room full of unaware passers-by.

They were slipping along the wall of the corridor, extremely aware of any nearby guards. Violet was tailing whoever seemed to be going in the direction they needed (up), slipping through behind them whenever they used their keycard to open a door. Zharov was keeping pace and had adapted well to his newly-invisible state despite his previous outburst. In all honesty, Violet wasn't sure it would work when she'd first thought of it, but by keeping half an eye on the flow of power through her hand and into his extremely warm one she managed to maintain the invisibility over two people. Contrary to what she'd expected, it wasn't a drain; instead of sharing her energy supplies over two people it seemed to tap into his own, halving her expected burden. All she need to do was make sure she kept pushing her invisibility into his hand just the tiniest bit. His body seemed to adapt and do the rest of the work, like she was a battery and he the now-completed circuit.

Three corridors and four square, metal staircases carefully navigated later, she slipped into a large room just behind a guard and stared at what was before her.

Three helicopters, neatly lined up on landing bays, in a large metal hangar. The floor above was made of metal slats; Violet was willing to bet it would slide back to reveal open sky. There were two or three guards loitering around the empty room on a balcony that ran the distance of the hangar, half-way up the wall. The temperature of the room was considerably lower than that of the corridor they'd left behind. Violet could see her breath misting in the air and she hoped it was too slight to be noticed.

This was all wrong. Syndrome would never leave such an obvious weakness in his base undefended. Nevertheless, this was the only chance they had, regardless of whether it had all the hallmarks of a trap. She hadn't been kidding when she'd had a go at Zharov; all evidence had pointed toward Syndrome being as ruthless as she remembered and had no desire to be in his clutches again. It wouldn't take him too long to figure out who she was, and God knew what he would do to Zharov and his men.

Settling on an internal compromise, she tugged Zharov toward the middle helicopter and hoped that their eventual visibility would be disguised between the other two, larger craft. It was the smallest; it might have been a scout helicopter. Its cabin held a pilot and passenger and its main body looked like it would hold luggage or equipment, but no people. It also had a sign stuck to the windscreen in both Russian and English: "DANGER – awaiting repair. Do not use." Further along the side of the helicopter was a tangle of wires sticking out of a panel.

"Kasatka?" she whispered. "Is it fixable?"

"Yes," he replied shortly, "But I will need to see my hands."

Violet paused, calculating the risk. She was fairly certain she'd be able to blow a hole in the roof with a well-crafted shield (a cone, pointy, thrust hard toward the ceiling should do the trick), but visibility here could throw the whole game.

Did they have a choice?

She took another look around. No guards in sight for the moment.

"Roll up your sleeve," she whispered. "I want to be able to grab your arm if we need to phase out again."

His hand flexed in hers for a moment before a whispered "Done" reached her ears.

"Go," she said, and stopped her power flow.

Zharov plunged his arms into the depths of the helicopter circuitry immediately, not taking time to readjust to his newfound visibility. Violet's eyes roamed around the hangar, continually seeking intrusive guards. She didn't like this vulnerability at all. Zharov was muttering to himself in fractured English, entirely consumed by the task at hand. Twice, Violet had to grab his arm to phase them out when a guard wandered past. She kept scanning the hangar, ever so alert for trouble. There was no way that Syndrome hadn't rigged this hangar for some kind of trap; he just wasn't banking on his intruders' superhuman stealth capabilities.

Her attention was drawn back to the helicopter when Zharov very quietly closed the panel and gave Violet a nod. "All done –"

"_Stay where you are!_" a voice shouted from high above them, the sound amplified by the metal walls. Something ricocheted off of the helicopter beside Violet and hit her shoulder with paralysing force, spinning her around. Violet took control of the movement and backed herself against the helicopter using the energy of her spin as she felt a dull but powerful ache begin in the soft spot between pectoral muscle and shoulder. Looking up, Violet saw a guard staring down at them from a window so high up the wall she'd missed it, but what was pointed at them was unmistakably a gun.

"Get in," Violet snarled immediately. Zharov clawed open the door to the cockpit of the helicopter and shut it behind Violet as she clambered in, moving over to make room for her. "Rubber bullets," Violet said flatly, wiping the blood from a vicious-looking bruise on her shoulder. "Only deadly at close range. We should be fine in here."

"Take off?" asked Zharov, his urgent brown eyes meeting hers in the lighted interior of the cockpit. Violet could hear boots now and heavy feet running.

"Take off. I'll take care of the roof."

Zharov flipped all the startup switches and for one surreal moment, Violet found herself admiring his dexterity even in the lower temperatures of the hangar; once again wondering how his metabolism, which appeared to be able to melt sheet metal at ten paces, managed to keep him so warm and not just burn him away.

She heard the very welcome sound of the rotors starting up as Zharov checked everything. The low noise evolved into a high-pitched gale as the helicopter lifted from the ground just ahead of the swarms of guards that were flooding into the chamber in amounts too great to have been coincidence. Her 'trap' hunch had been correct.

As she focused on the roof above her, preparing the shape of the shield in her mind that would rip it open, she became aware of the fact that they were no longer moving upwards.

"What is it?" she yelled over the roar of the rotors.

"There is something wrong with the rotor hub," shouted Zharov, furiously flicking switches. "The problem was not just with the wiring. The rotor system cannot cope with two passengers."

Violet nodded to show she understood and cast a glance down to the ridiculously wind-swept hangar below them. The guard were firing but the strength of the winds generated by the helicopter in the enclosed space was enough to misdirect the bullets, although there still was a stray _ping_ing noise as a bullet struck the underside of the craft. She turned to Zharov and met his gaze full on.

"Take off. Get out of here. Get the pilots, head to Noril'sk."

"I _cannot_, I have _told_ you –"

"I'm getting out."

She moved to open the door to the cabin on her side, mentally gauging the distance to the floor, when Zharov grabbed her arm in a rock-like grip.

"No," he said simply. "I leave no man behind."

"Just as well I'm not a man. Give the information about this base to your government, get it to my agency, they'll send in special backup."

Zharov said nothing, but there was a fiery glint in his eye and his grip didn't lessen.

"They need to know this place is here," Violet ground out. "Get to the radio I left with Andropov. Radio for help, all frequencies. They already know you're there. Time for everyone else to know too."

"You will not come out of here alive," said Zharov flatly, and she saw the pure rage boiling behind his eyes. She looked downwards, and then looked back at him.

--I--

She looked at him. Zharov wanted to recoil; she looked unhappy, and tired, worn down by too many years of ruthless secret-keeping and burden-bearing.

"I might," she said softly.

And for a moment there was silence in their little world. The noise of bullets bouncing from the craft was not there, the rotors soundless, the muffled shouting below non-existent. There was only Zharov's shocked realisation that she meant it. She really meant this.

"You do not have to do this," he said quietly, trying to reach out to her with his sincerity.

Violet shrugged out of his grip and looked down again, and Zharov realised that this was the first time she had seemed fully human to him.

"Maybe not," she said in a low voice. "But maybe it's for the best."

There was a pause, and the sounds from below filtered back in again. In that moment of hiatus Zharov saw a glimpse of the pain she bore. It wasn't obvious and she hid it well, but it was right in front of you if you knew where to look. It was in the set of her shoulders, the line of her jaw, the grip in her hands. A person in pain will tense up to lessen the burden. She thought that burden so heavy that dying would be a relief. A _relief_.

"I'll take care of the roof for you," said Violet, never raising her eyes to his. "Good luck, Kasatka." And she'd opened the door and dropped the twenty feet to the floor.

Zharov stared downwards in shocked incomprehension, jolted out of this reverie only by the noise of tearing metal. Looking up, he saw a giant hole had formed in the roof of the hangar – large enough for the helicopter – and there was clear blue sky beyond it.

There was nothing he could do. He had never felt this helpless in his life.

He headed upwards.

--I--

Violet braced her shins in the long seconds before she hit the floor, running over the physics in her mind. _Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. _She could just shift the force caused by her landing –

Her feet hit the floor and she let her joints absorb the shock by dropping her to her knees. At the same time, she focused hard on the force of her landing, projecting upwards and beyond her body. Dimly and at the edge of her concentration, she heard the sheer noise of tearing metal and the flow of power she'd used to shift her kinetic energy faded.

Then she looked up.

The room was filled with guards. Guards filled the floor, surrounded her on all sides on the balcony, poured into the other two helicopters, wrestled with a control panel on the wall to open the roof hatch. Guards who had guns that fired rubber bullets. It was a clever move on Syndrome's part – such bullets were only deadly when directly aimed or at close range, and so this avoided accidental killings or damage to his precious base. She didn't have long before the guards watching her decided just waiting for her to make the next move wasn't going to cut much ice with the boss.

She uttered a quick prayer to whatever deities might be listening, commending her soul to any god that could find it. Then she jumped.

Later, Violet would look back on it and label it as her most definitive attempt at self-annihilation in her four years of self-disregard. The casualness with which she regarded her own possible death, the way she didn't register any pain despite the massive amount she must have been dealt, her temporary amnesia of her shield capabilities, her sheer unadulterated focus on her Last Stand – it all added up to self-destruction on an overly-dramatic scale. She was going to drown in the darkness, drown in the blood, and drown willingly.

She landed on the shoulders of a nearby guard and his knees buckled under him, Violet having focused all of her weight on the heels of her feet. She rode the momentum smoothly, following him down before rolling and swiping out the feet of a guard right next to him. That was the first advantage of facing insurmountable odds. You hardly had to aim.

This seemed to galvanise the loitering guards, who had previously been unsure as to how to deal with a single small girl. Violet was a definate threat now and they'd been trained to handle that. Shots sounded off all around her but she kept low, taking out another guard with a quick yank on his hamstrings. That was the second advantage of having more enemies than allies: most of the time they ended up shooting each other or getting in their own way. And she would play the few advantages she had for all they were worth. She might not outlive this fight, but she could even the odds in it considerably.

She slid left, a textbook manoeuvre, taking down a few more guards with well-placed blows to the backs of their knees. She jumped again and sailed over their heads as they fought to get their guns to follow her speed. She was slight, and she was fast, and in a room full of guards who had been taught that bulkier was better she had a tactical superiority over them as individuals. They were slow and clumsy.

Violet thought for a moment that this was probably their first real skirmish; they'd evidently never been in a hostile situation in this job before. That would explain their awkwardness, the holes in the otherwise-tight security, their inability to adapt to new situations. And they must have all been rookies, not a sergeant or captain or commander among 'em, because there was no order amongst the confusion. It was just a a babble of men trying to keep up with a foe too fast (or invisible) for them to see. That was another flaw, Violet realised later. There were no women. The guards were all men and used to relying on brute strength, something any man could have if he trained hard and long enough. But women were built differently, biologically speaking – a man's dynamis was strength, but a woman's power was speed and technique. You needed both in a guard system.

Violet hooked one ankle around a guard's neck, twisted, rolled, jackknifed off a wall in a smooth rebound and laid out another three guards with a swift spin. She hardly dared believe it, disappointment tingeing the shock underneath the focus. She was holding her own. She was surrounded by enemies who had a vast superiority of numbers and she was _holding her own_.

There were more guards pouring in – she could feel the density in the air of the room change. But it wasn't changing much; the hole she'd punched in the ceiling seemed to have jammed its opening mechanism and the gap created was ostensibly too small for the other two helicopters. She'd bought Zharov running time, though she was willing to bet there were other hangars sending out craft as fast as radio messaging would allow.

Somebody grabbed her arm and yanked. Violet manipulated her body, shifted her centre of gravity and tightened the arc so that she landed her bony shoulder into the man's solar plexus. He dropped her and doubled over, wheezing. Violet used his back as a launch pad, tucking herself into a tight ball to minimise the impact of the rubber bullets and promptly landed on another guard. This one had been watching her descent and was prepared, however; his arms caught her across the back and she flew away. But she had control, tight control, and she angled her drop so that she landed on her hands. Flipping over and turning in a tight, sweet circle, she touched down on the floor of the hangar.

There was sweat pouring from her body. Her energy supplies were good but her fat supplies weren't, and this was a punishing pace nobody could sustain for long. She threw her weight behind every punch and kick, locked her muscles so iron-clad that they never budged with every block, and it had been at least eight hours since she'd eaten. She was fading in an unusually figurative sense. The guards knew it. They could see her laboured breathing and the way her movements lacked their previous razor edge.

But she didn't stop. She had reserves of energy that were severely depleted, but there was still some left. She was here now in order to drain that tidal breath, the bottom ten percent, that last gasp of energy. She had no reason to save any for later. It was here and now or not ever.

_Tidal breath,_ Violet remembered faintly as she delivered a bone-crushing elbow jab into the face of a man behind her. _The bottom ten percent of our lungs is reserved for tidal breath. The fabled last gasp of drowners and chokers. Once you expel that.._.

She turned on the spot, pivoting smoothly, and caught another approaching guard in the throat with her heel. There wasn't as much power behind it this time. Still, you didn't need much power when hitting a man in the trachea. _Less than a pound of pressure to break skin,_ she thought crazily.

She could feel herself being backed against the wall now. There must have been someone of a higher rank controlling things, as it wasn't the free-for-all skirmish it had been at the start. Violet focused instead on defending the small space she had, no longer losing energy to fast twists and movement. It was hack-slash-parry (insofar as she could with bare hands) at those within reach. Fortunately, more men were still pouring in so the guards nearest her were being pressed forward by the crush. None dared approach her directly. There were men lying immobile, groaning and gasping all over the hangar and none wished to risk her wrath. _They're not men,_ Violet thought with some level of disgust. _They've got socks in their pants instead of –_

Someone swung the butt of his rifle at Violet's head, or made a spirited attempt at a throw. She ducked instantly, kicked the man in his sock drawer and rolled again. She could feel a bead of sweat making its way rather insistently down her throat but there was no time to wipe it away. Suddenly, a hand grabbed her upper arm, fingers digging cruelly into the muscle. Violet twisted, planning to use her shoulder to drive the man into the wall, when her other arm was grabbed equally as harshly. The combined force of the guards working in tandem pushed her back about three feet and smashed her back into the metal wall of the hangar. Then there was a sharp force under her face, pushing her chin up, exposing her throat. It was a gun barrel.

She kicked out, once, wildly, and was rewarded when an arm and the gun barrel fell away. She dropped, intending to sweep out the feet of the other guard, when another arm hauled her back up again.

Violet was never quite sure what happened next. There was a sudden, black, soundless explosion and the shock of it sent her entire body limp.

Later, she'd realise it was the butt of a gun across the side of her face. Her mind went numb, useless, blank, and she sagged in her captor's grip. They let her go and she slid down to her knees, fell backwards, slipped down the wall and sprawled out. Her vision went dark but her mind kept turning over, disjointed and disorientated, trying desperately to make the connections which would spark her body back to life again. She could hear distant shouting and in the confusion of her brain she recognised it to be her own inner voice yelling at her. But she couldn't quite hear it... there was something she need to be doing, something that should be happening, but it was too far away...

Over the next few minutes she washed in and out of consciousness, waxing and waning, losing time. Her only coherent thought was _the last ten percent_. _The last ten percent._ She had a feeling it was important but she couldn't figure out why.

The floor was cool. She felt it under her body. There was something urgent happening around her – she could feel the susurration in the air. There was something urgent going on in her own mind as well, something she should be aware of. Her inner voice was screaming at her now but her own thoughts seemed so detached from her, separated by a thick layer of impenetrable fog. Instead, she let her senses (what was left of them still operating) hold sway in her mind.

Violet was half-aware of arms picking her her up, one under her knees and one under her shoulders with a gentleness she couldn't fathom. A hand, presumably somebody else's, tipped her head sideway and forwards to lie on the chest of this stranger, easing the tension on her spine considerably. A finger traced the length of the scar on her face, ending with a thoughtful tap on her collarbone. She should have felt angry at this violation, enraged that someone _dared_ touch her, frightened that they would do it again. She felt nothing, she saw nothing.

Then there was movement, a slight vibration in the cavity of the chest of the man that carried her. He was talking, and now moving. Violet was trying to get back thought, trying to get back anything that this semi-conscious drowsiness prevented. Any coherent thought at all. She succeeded for a moment in cracking her eyelids but they were simply too heavy, and no messages were getting through to her limbs. She'd drained them of everything they'd had to give, and this... this, surely, was the last of her energy.

Violet was pretty sure that she'd decided to stop fighting something, just a little while ago. So she simply let herself drift, flotsam on the big sea of emptiness that surrounded her on every side, and let total darkness take over. It was something of a relief; she'd spent so long fighting. If she was going to leave, then she welcomed it and drowned in the clean, clear, aerated blackness.

_Ten percent,_ she heard in herself as she drifted further and further away. _Drowning. The last ten percent..._

* * *

_To be continued._

* * *

**  
Miss Keith:** Yes, they'll meet properly, but not quite yet. Sorry about the cliffy... 


	5. v

No. I cannot allow myself to think about this. I have a job to do, many jobs to do, and miles to go before I sleep.  
_- Unknown author_

* * *

Private Newman was not a fool. He was simply inexperienced in armed combat. So, when everything went to Hell in a handbasket, he'd considered himself fortunate that he'd been quite a way from it. He'd been one of the guards on the balcony when the alarm sounded, watching the guard force itself (about an even fifty-fifty split of Russian and American private soldiers — the money for this had been too good to miss, and many men had relocated to Russia for the job) take on a young, teenage girl and get their asses whupped. Because of his position on the balcony, he'd had quite a good view of said whuppage, and within five minutes of the fights' end he'd been ordered to report to his commanding officer to carefully explain all he'd seen.

Insofar as his sergeant understood it, it went something like this.

1. Well, sarge, the alarm sounded, so we all scrambled to get to good shot positions, 'cause that's what we're trained for, right? Us marksmen on the balcony? I was _supposed_ to be there. Well, we saw the helicopter take off and we thought they were having a joke. There was no way they could get out, and the thing wasn't even armed. It seemed, like, a _really_ stupid thing to do. So we fired a few warning shots at it, but we made sure not the hurt the 'copter 'cause that's why the boss gave us pacification bullets, right? So they sort of hovered for a minute — must've found the problem with the rotor mechanism. It's all loose. Can't go up very far, or the helicopter can't take the pressure of weight and torque at the same ti– yes, sir, getting to it.

2. So they stayed there. Then the girl drops out, so we track her down to the floor with our rifles, like we're trained to, and then there's this Godawful noise and there's a hole in the ceiling. Just like that. Sir, I swear on my mother's _grave_ that's what happened. They must have planted a bomb or something.

3. She stays there for a second, and then she takes out two of the guards at the front — Private Abelev and Private Patsayev. He's just has new dental work done. I bet he's pissed now.

4. Uh, _anyway_, sir, she's up, quick as a flash, but she stays low to the ground. Made herself a smaller target. I couldn't get a clean shot at her, and neither could anyone else. She kept everyone between herself and us. Smart. And then she was attacking them from below and then she sort of vanished in the crush. I mean, I couldn't see her _anywhere_ but everyone was still getting beaten up. She reappeared a bit later but it's _ghostlike_ the way she moved, sir. It wasn't _right_. And there were so many guards they were all kind of getting in each other's way. That's when you arrived, sir, and sorted us out into formation.

5. By then she looked kinda tired. It'd been ten minutes I reckon, sir, and she looked like she was gonna drop. So I kept my rifle trained on her and bang! I got her two, three times on the back and shoulder. And those rubber bullets _hurt_. They can get through skin and everything. But she didn't even _flinch_. In fact, I'd think she hadn't noticed it. Then I saw a few other bullets get her and she acted like they hadn't even _hit_ her. That's not right, I told myself. And she was still pretty low, even though we could see clearer to shoot.

6. Then she sort of flew across the room — musta jumped, or something — and she landed real neat, didn't even pause for balance and caught Private Mayer in the face with her foot. But then someone threw their rifle at her, and she ducked, and when she came up again they were ready for her — Private Hecks and Private Ghukov, I mean — and they grabbed her. She got away from Hecks but someone else, couldn't make it out at the distance, grabbed her again, and then Hecks hit her across the face with hs rifle. Then she went all limp and they dropped her.

7. But sir, I _swear_, no-one can move like she did. It's like she wasn't _there_ half the time, like she was invisible. Maybe she's, like, a _super-human spy_ or something, sarge.

8. You're looking at me in a funny way, sarge.

9. Sorry, sarge.

The rest didn't need to be told to the Sergeant; it was common knowledge now — how the Commander of the Guard had arrived personally sixty seconds after she'd gone down to get her himself. Nikolaevsky had checked her pulse and picked her up very carefully, and very gingerly. Like his men, he was aware she could spring back into consciousness at any moment. He'd knelt, held her and watched her for a moment, her legs and head loose and unsupported, two of his fingers to the pulse point in her neck, before he nodded at the guards. She was definitely out. He picked her up properly and turned to the hangar doors, knowing what he would see.

The Boss was there and moving towards Nikolaevsky, trailing a sort of terrible silence in his wake. He was angry. When the Boss got angry he spread it around with a large shovel.

He'd reached Nikolaevsky, and there was a murmured conversation that every guard in the room had strained to hear.

Then the boss did something completely unprecedented. He touched the prisoner. _Touched_ her. He tipped her head up and to the side, and then traced her weird scar with one finger. There were a few more words of conversation before Nikolaevsky left with a detail of four men. Private Newman had then decided it was prudent to make himself scarce, and had just turned to leg it back to his bunk room when a heavy hand had descended on his shoulder and a low, growly voice said, "Where d'you think _you're_ going, you happy _zasranec_? Sarge Robertson and Sarge Kosov wanna see you _right now_."

Newman had made his report, produced his military, technological and personal opinions on the matter, and had "yes, sir"d his way from the debriefing room with the faint and puzzling feeling that the girl intruder had... done something. No-one could move that fast, he told himself. _No-one._

--I--

Violet slowly rose to consciousness with the oddly self-doubting sensation that something, somewhere, had gone terribly wrong. But there was _also_ something wrong with her arms. And legs. And chest. And body. They were all too heavy, weighted down with blocks of uranium that leached the energy from her muscles.

She woke a little more and realised dimly that it was fatigue. The muscles in her hands and fingers, especially, felt like rusty cables. She twitched them to the accompaniment of a raw scream of defiance from her tendons.

She slipped away for a little while, and really couldn't have judged how long. She dreamed that tall blue men were in the room with her, whatever room it was. They were staring down at her and talking, she could hear it, but the figures she saw never moved or opened their mouths. They just glared in pointed icy-blue silence, while all around them was the sound of people muttering.

Violet tried to wake again and this time she got as far as the sensation of body-heat-warmed, flat metal under her body before she lost her grasp and floated away.

When she started the climb back to wakefulness again, this time she knew there was no going back. Something was waiting for her; something, somebody, some situation to deal with. Some_thing_. As sensation returned to her body, she waited for her thoughts to line up and present themselves sheepishly for inspection.

Her body felt... wrong. There was an ominous silence to it, her nerves reporting very little, like they were waiting until she was fully conscious to spring a big, unpleasant chunk of information on her. There was a dull and strangely painless throbbing in the side of her face, and her throat appeared to have changed texture.

Worrying. Something about herself was different, something beyond her control, and this sparked her to full wakefulness.

She dragged her eyes open and then shut them almost closed again, dazzled by the bright light in the room. Blinking once or twice, her immediate field of vision was grey and shadows of grey.

A cell, then. Like the one Zharov was in, if the angles of the walls were any indicator. Odd. She thought she'd be dead by now.

Violet breathed in deep for a moment and coughed without warning. The change in the lining of her throat was a slimy residue that she recognised to be blood. Immediately, she braced her hand on the floor of the cell and pushed slightly, wanting to check her surroundings. Her arm was shaky and unsupportive. _Not today,_ she thought fiercely, and managed to push herself into a sitting position.

Every single muscle in her body screamed in protest. Not one of them was ignored. They all pulled taught and howled their abuse to the overworked pain receptors in her brain, hysterical messages travelling up her corroded synapses until her insides seemed to char with it. _Pain travels one hundred and seven meters a second_, she thought fuzzily before locking down on her thoughts. She needed tight focus, which was getting hard to come by; her vision washed in and out, a grey mist trailing over everything and blurring the edges.

Violet took another deep breath and coughed with slightly more control this time, clearing her airways of slime. Her lungs felt raw and achy, as if they'd been fed through a shredder. She added that to the 'things I can ignore' list she'd compiled in her head, boxed the pain away in a clever little move she'd taught herself years ago, and inspected herself properly.

It wasn't just her muscles that hurt. Violet peeled back one of her sleeves to inspect the new damage, ignoring the old scarring. She was littered in bruises — harsh, dark, angry ones. Judging by the feel of her shoulders, sides and abdomen she'd taken a pretty bad beating. She was betting her back was worse. There was dark blood, dried and tacky, on her forearms and leaking through rips in her long-sleeve t-shirt. Rolling her sleeve back down with unresponsive fingers and an arm that felt leaden, she started making tentative thoughts about changing position. Then there was a brief _whumm_ noise, and the sudden sounds of excited chatter filled her cell.

Violet looked up muzzily, a move she hadn't gotten round to. Her neck creaked as she took in the four guards around her cell with six more guards keeping back onlookers. Instantly, a wave of dizziness swamped her and the dull legato thumping in the base of her head became a pounding bass line in pain.

Violet made the connection. It wasn't that hard. The smack she'd taken across her face was situated exactly where the throbbing sensation was now, and she recognised the symptoms of what _could_ have been grade two concussion. The confusion and disorientation surely fit the bill.

Three guards marched in with rifles pointed at her. Her vision clearing slightly, she looked up at them while being careful to keep her face totally expressionless.

"Get up," one of them said, motioning with his rifle. Violet took a moment to compose herself, noting with interest the man's American accent. Pulling all her weakness and fatigue together in one ball inside herself, she rose smoothly to her feet (still bare, and the joints ached abominably) and faced them without shaking, flinching or saying a word. The dizziness was washing in and she fought hard to keep it at bay. The same guard who had spoken motioned with his rifle again. Violet took steady, calm steps out of the cell. She managed to do this without stumbling or falling, an impressive feat considering that her sense of balance was severely skewed.

There were three guards to either side of her, a total detail of six. The other four were clearing a way through the crowds of people who were all staring at her with a mixture of awe and fear while murmuring to each other.

"Walk," said the guard, and the six guards around her began to move.

Violet started to walk within their protective circle, aware with every step how loud her thighs and back screamed in pain, how her knees wanted to crumple with every step. But she knew how to handle that — she'd perfected her ability to ignore pain long ago. And this was _nothing_ in comparison, really.

They walked through corridors for perhaps two minutes. Every worker they passed stopped and stared in morbid curiosity, pressing themselves against the wall to allow the seven to pass. Evidently, Violet thought, she had become something of a legend. If these people were as unused to infiltration attempts as they appeared to be then it was no surprise she'd come to be held in a kind of horrified awe. She'd broached the best defences the base had to offer, she'd fought against insurmountable odds and had survived — just.

Shortly, they arrived at a white door. A guard flashed a card at a pad set in the wall. The door opened and Violet was pushed inside, none too kindly. There were a few more guards within, all of them with rifles trained on her. The room itself was white, the dark grey of the guards contrasting sharply; the table inside was white too. The two chairs on either side of said desk were white. And occupying the chair facing her was Syndrome.

He watched her with a slight grin and a dangerous look. Instead of his white shirtsleeves, he wore a black t-shirt under a brown shirt once again rolled up to the elbow. The autumn colouring suited him, she thought in a moment of bizarre dispassion. As she shook the thought away, Violet felt a moment of unease — her thinking was cloudy and her wits were less-than-shining; her concussion made it hard for her to process things. She knew she wasn't in any shape to verbally spar with Syndrome, and she hoped it would be over quickly.

"Sit," he said, indicating the chair in front of him. Aware of the weakness in her joints, Violet ventured the few steps forward and sat down without any indication that she was in pain. She kept her face utterly expressionless and her eyes firmly trained on Syndrome, who now sat no more than three feet away. She got her first good, close-up look at him.

He looked older than she remembered, which was no surprise really. His movements were much more measured and toned down, as was his attitude and demeanour. He seemed lankier — he'd lost some weight, and the strange lines of his arms suggested he'd replaced some, but not all, of that with muscle. For some reason, his freckles were gone, an interesting twist whose basis she couldn't fathom. His voice seemed easier on the ears as well, less vicious and at a lower tone. He was leaning back casually in his chair, one elbow resting on its back while he studied her nonchalantly. Violet knew what he saw — bloody appearance, totally emotionless face and the stillness in herself that showed zero weakness. It was her default state of being, apart from the bloody exterior.

"Well," he drawled, sitting up properly and leaning his forearms on the desk. "You've had a busy twenty-four hours."

Violet said nothing, but continued to stare at him. He stared right back, his face seemingly mildly amused, but she could see the machinery operating behind that gaze. He leaned over the desk slightly, hands clasped together.

"You got into my base, took out a good chunk of the guards sent to take you down, released a prisoner from an inescapable cell. I like you."

Violet watched him and continued to say nothing. The grin he wore unnerved her, as did his proximity, and there was no recognition on his features — just that barely-controlled smugness. Surely he couldn't have forgotten her face? She'd changed a bit, certainly, but his life's obsession had been her father. Surely that would have extended to her as well?

She tried not to think about it too loudly, wondering if Syndrome would be able to hear that thought if it was forefront in her brain.

"So, I'm going to offer you a job. Here. In my guard. You've got the smarts for it, the skill, obviously. Provided you tell me who sent you here, how you found my base, and how and why you got inside." He paused, seemingly to study her reaction, which was non-existent. Violet didn't feel tempted in the slightest. There was Zharov to worry about.

"If you refuse, I'll understand..." His eyes gleamed for a moment. "I will then instruct my guards to take you to a holding cell to be tortured until you give me the information. It's your choice."

Violet kept immobile and silent. She saw this anger him in the way he frowned slightly and leaned over the desk again.

"Perhaps you don't understand. I'm offering you a well-paid position in return for your loyalty. The other option is for me to have the guards beat it out of you. _Torturously_. And pain, let me tell you, is not a pleasant experience. I've been through it myself."

"You've never been tortured."

The words were out before she could stop them, in a raspy but surprisingly functional voice, utterly inflectionless. She saw his eyes widen for a second and then narrow again, his anger stepping up a notch. He leaned over the desk a little more, meaning Violet had to look upwards to keep his gaze locked on her own.

"I was trapped in an exploding plane, once, Miss Intruder," he snarled. Yes, he didn't want to admit it, she could see it in his eyes, but the edge of snap in his voice proved she'd hit a raw nerve. "I survived, just, by means I won't divulge to the likes of you. I had major reconstructive surgery and plastic surgery to repair the damage." _That explains why you don't have any freckles, then. Skin grafts._ "It hurt more than anything _you've_ ever experienced. And you sit there, a little beaten up, with your fancy scar, and you tell me that wasn't _torture?_"

He was half-risen from the chair, weight braced on his palms on the table. His voice was the same even tone but with a level of ferocity that bespoke a clear warning. _Do not push this._

"You've never been tortured," she repeated in the same voice. The expression on Syndrome's face was a grimace of rage. His arm shot out across the gap of space between them and hauled upwards on her long-sleeve top, and she didn't fight him as he brought her face closer to his.

"_And you have?_" he spat. Any amiable exterior he might of had was long gone. Violet was thankful he didn't know who she really was. She'd probably have been shot by this point.

"Yes," she replied simply. Syndrome's grip on her top tightened.

"Oh, yes? And what did you 'suffer' that I didn't, with my eighty percent skin grafts that took _four months_?"

Violet looked him flatly in the eye for five long seconds, and then rose to stand on her feet. With some care, she removed his hand from her top, noting the way adrenaline dumbed the pain down and gave her some dexterity back.

"You've never tasted your own marrow," she said flatly, and with both hands pulled up and off her long-sleeved black t-shirt.

She wore a black sports halter underneath the top, so she wasn't worried about a lack of decency. As one, every pair of eyes turned to stare at her as she stood straight and proud under the harsh white halogen lamps. They cast no shadows. They left nothing hidden. She knew what she looked like. She'd caught glimpses from time to time in her mirror, but she always looked away again.

Her entire torso, what could be seen of it, was sliced up in scars that were especially vivid against her pale skin. They were deep and entrenched into her flesh. There were strange, archaic patterns combined with random slashes, and strange dots — up her arms, along her shoulder and the line of her collarbone, down her torso and under the waistband of her black combat pants. There was a chunk of muscle missing from the right side of her abdomen, the skin that dipped down into the curious hollow a strange silver colour. The scarring was of different depths and shapes, and particularly odd was a horizontal row of small dots under her right collarbone — twelve, evenly-spaced. But she was covered in the lines and shapes of what was obviously produced by someone with a knife and a strange desire to see how deep he could cut before she bled to death. Some scars were obscured by new bruises and patches of tacky dried blood, but the dents and dips in the flesh could not be disguised.

Her back was worse.

But she didn't turn around. Instead, she pulled her t-shirt back over her head and sat down, fighting the trembling in her limbs.

Syndrome straightened up slowly, eyes not leaving her only visible scar — the one on her face. He walked slowly around to her side of the desk, his features unreadable. Violet's eyes turned to follow him until he was looming above her.

He reached out with one hand and gently, persuasively, tipped her head a little way toward him and to her left. With the other hand, his finger delicately slipped the neckline of her top below her right collarbone, and paused above that line of dots under it.

"Needle tracks," he said quietly, puzzled. His eyes raised to hers again, and he really was frowning — in confusion or mystification, as best she could tell. Then he tapped her collarbone thoughtfully in a gesture that was oddly familiar, and drew away from her to murmur something to a guard behind her. There was the sound of one of the guards leaving the room before Syndrome returned himself to the seat in front of her, on the opposite side of the desk.

Her skin burned from the contact. She hadn't been touched like _that_ — gently, and without intention to wound — in years.

He leaned back and looked at her, eyes focused upon her facial scar, that slightly puzzled expression still evident upon his face.

"No," he said quietly, thoughtfully. "No, I've never been tortured, not like _that_... but _you_ have..."

There was an edge to that statement, some hidden meaning Violet couldn't pick up on. Syndrome sat that way for a couple of minutes, just watching her, eyes never leaving her face. His finger tapped at his chin contemplatively and there was silence until the door behind Violet opened.

A guard approached Syndrome and laid a sand-coloured file on the desk in front of him. Syndrome immediately picked up the file and folded the cover back on itself so she couldn't see the label before flipping through a few of the pages contained within. At length, he held up a photograph to the light to see it better before tucking it back into the file.

Finally, his eyes met hers again. The puzzlement was gone, and a grin had taken its place.

"I thought you were just an intruder... a clever, resourceful intruder. But you're something a little bit more, aren't you?"

She kept her face impassioned as Syndrome's eyes turned back to the file. Inside, her organs felt like they were frozen solid. He'd figured out her identity. He knew who she was.

"You've made a habit of breaking into other people's bases," he said with a cryptic smile. For a moment, a memory flashed before her eyes — _you don't have to, use the co-ordinates from the last launch_ — until she shut it away again. A clear head. That's what she needed.

Syndrome leant forward a little bit, grin slowly evolving into a smirk. "You know, I never would have guessed it if it weren't for the reports I received, pictures and all." He shook the folder a little for emphasis. "I thought you looked a little familiar when I first saw you up close, after the guards took you down yesterday. Then, I saw –" He gestured toward her with his free hand.

_I _knew_ he'd remember my face after all._

His smirk was firmly starched into place on his mouth. He leaned back a little and Violet internally braced herself for the exposure of her identity.

"_You_ are code-name ES-34."

The bottom dropped out of Violet's world and she fell with it, the terror starting in her stomach and spreading up and down her body, threading sickly through her veins like some kind of idiot antidote to blood. Her vision flashed grey for a second and the hair on her forearms stood up sharply. She fought to keep her breathing even, battled to avoid panic-breaths and the fight-or-flight rush. No. She would sit here. She would be as expressionless as normal.

_No, no-one knew — how — how could he possibly know that?_

Syndrome paged through the file for another few seconds, unknowingly allowing the panic in Violet to spread right through to her fingertips. They tingled, overriding the pain in her muscles. But she kept it from showing in her face or posture. He didn't need to know how badly it had affected her. He _mustn't_ know how badly it affected her.

He hadn't recognised her face, he'd recognised her _scars_.

Violet _should_ have felt surprised. She should have felt elated that he didn't know her true identity. These feelings never made it to her brain. She locked down on her emotions, harder than she ever had before, ruthlessly pouring them into the dark of her subconscious mind where they couldn't interrupt her now much-more-urgent plans to escape. Staying here wasn't an option. Waiting for them to kill her wasn't an option. She had to get out, and soon.

Syndrome looked up from the file and caught her eye again, the cheerful blueness of his gaze directly at odds with the evil that had caused such a panic response in Violet.

"But that was a long time ago, right, Thirty-four? Four years and some months ago, according to this report. Doctor Harker was always _very_ meticulous when it came to recording data. And maybe you can help us with _that_ little mystery." Syndrome flipped to the back of the file, Violet's eyes following his every move. "The last transmission we received from him said that everything was going fine."

_No_, thought Violet, her internal voice completely hysterical. _His exact words were "All is going according to plan, we're getting more data from thirty-four than we ever believed possible. We'll continue until the subject is no longer of any use."_

"After that, we never heard from him again. I found this very odd, so I sent some staff to check it out. What they found was that his laboratory was burned down, approximately half of the guard force I had lent to him was dead and the other half missing. Test subject ES-34 — you, in other words — was gone. Doctor Harker himself was found dead in his main lab, apparently asphyxiated, stabbed and shot. Now that's a lot of damage."

Syndrome paused again, his smirk gone. This time, when he spoke, his voice was deliberate with menace.

"I thought that he'd been raided, or perhaps a mutiny. But after witnessing the carnage that you dealt out in my scouter hangar, I'm inclined to believe that you did just a little more than escape."

Violet said nothing. There was a low pounding sensation beginning in her forehead, like a heavy second heart. She nearly touched her left pocket to ensure the pills she'd secreted there were still intact, but thought better of it while under such close observation.

"You killed him, didn't you? You broke free and you killed him."

Syndrome leaned back in his chair, his easy air gone. He looked at her coldly.

"I funded Harker's research because he claimed he could isolate the gene that gave supers their abilities, and also because he claimed he could find out at what point supers were too exhausted to use their powers. I could have used such information... carefully." He paused again to stare at her, his every movement deliberate and heavy with dangerous intent. "Now, this is what I know. I know Harker captured you infiltrating his base. He worked on you as his subject, Thirty-four, for at least thirty-three weeks. He sent every single report of his findings directly to me, so I have all of the data he accumulated before you killed him. But he never sent me any direct information about you. Yes, you're a super, but he was non-specific as to your talents. However, after watching you I'm betting it's speed and agility."

Violet felt a thin contour of satisfaction, like a mellow orange line of stitch in the starry dark cloth of her terror. She was good, and she'd trained as hard as her body allowed her to, and Syndrome was used to basing an entire guard force around brute force. He didn't know that her speed, dexterity and strength were all down to a violently rigourous training programme, that people were capable of such speed naturally if they focused on celerity rather than strength in their workouts. In essence, _he didn't know her full capabilities_, which in turn meant he couldn't identify her as Violet Parr.

He was underestimating her.

_Good_.

"I also know you're a super, no doubt employed by the National Super's Alliance — you're American, judging by your accent. Which leads me to another question: why did you come here?"

This one wasn't rhetorical. Violet still stayed silent, meeting his glare with the wall of steel behind her eyes. The rage in her gut was rising, but she controlled it with ease of long practise. _I funded Harker's research_, he said. Him. Funded Harker. He. Him. _This man_ was the reason for all she'd suffered. He was the reason for her scars and the nightmares and everything she'd undergone. Syndrome was the reason she slept no more than six hours a night, more often three, the reason why she kept everything she felt so far away from herself, the reason why the words _Thirty-four_ dominated most of her bad dreams and the reason for her migraines.

He'd made her suffer, and he'd never known it.

Syndrome closed the file without breaking their gaze and leaned forward over the table again, elbows on the table and fingers steepled. When she continued to say nothing, the iciness in Syndrome's voice continued to rise, matched by the coldness of Violet's gaze. It was a battle of wills.

"It can't be revenge, because I made sure that all traces to this base were removed from any contact. You trashed Harker's lab on your way out, so you destroyed any possible connection. That leaves me with one remaining alternative: you were sent here, on a mission, by the NSA. But why would they think to come here? My building gives off no signature." _Pride goes before a fall, Syndrome_. "More importantly: _how did you get inside?_ The heat filters mean you couldn't have got in through the ventilation, and none of the security measures were tripped for any of the exits..."

Syndrome trailed off, caught in this puzzle. Violet stayed silent. At last, he seemed to gather himself together, his blue eyes clouding over.

"Well," he said, suddenly businesslike. "We'll soon find out. You say you've been tortured before, Thirty-four, and looking at Harker's records I'm inclined to believe it. Frankly, I'm amazed you're still alive. Regardless, I need that information from you. My guards will do what they do best until you spill it. And they will do _well_ what they do best," he continued. "In fact, I dare say some of them feel like they owe you something in return for the episode in the hangar."

A hand descended heavily on Violet's shoulder and attempted to drag her up. Violet locked her muscles and stood in her own time, and at Syndrome's curt nod she was ushered from the room.

* * *

_To be continued._


	6. vi

In these silences something may rise.  
_- Stephen King, 'Desperation'_

* * *

Nikolaevsky watched from the corner of the interrogation room as the girl was alternately led, pushed and escorted from it. He straightened up from his slouch, unfolded his arms from across his chest, sloped nonchalantly across the room and sat down in the girl's recently-vacated chair. The Boss was leaning against the desk with his fingers steepled, eyes staring into the middle distance.

"That must have been some torture she went through," Nikolaevsky said in his low, rough Russian voice. The Boss' eyes immediately focused on him and he nodded, unlacing his fingers and pushing the yellow-orange file across to the man. Nikolaevsky picked it up and flicked through the first few pages with a low whistle.

"Those scars weren't just for show," he said, turning one of the accompanying photos on its side and wincing. "That Doctor Harker knew what he was doing. '_You've never tasted your own marrow..._' Says here he broke a zygomatic bone. Harshly," he added, glancing over a report.

The Boss nodded absently. "He wanted to see what would happen, whether she'd heal faster than a normal person." Eyes staring at nothing again, Nikolaevsky knew from experience that the Boss was thinking deep.

"I know _what_ she is," the Boss said at last, eyes never losing their faraway look. "But I don't know _who_ she is, how or why she got here, how she got in, or who her accomplice was. There's too many blanks, and since her accomplice has managed to make himself untrackable we need them filled in pretty quickly." He paused. "And there's _still_ something about her I can't quite pin down. I'm pretty sure I've got her powers wrong, and I've seen her someplace before this. It's her eyes, I think. I _know_ I've seen them before, but... _surely_ I'd recognise someone that closed-off...?"

"Conventional torture won't be much use," Nikolaevsky said thoughtfully, flicking through reports. "She's used to it. And I watched her when she was focusing on you. Her expression never changed. Not once. She's used to hiding away pain. Maybe you could use what you know about Harker to break her?"

The Boss' eyes focused on him once more. "How, Commander? Harker tortured her until she should have died, and she still managed to get out and kill him in the process. All that funding wasted, and I got roughly fifty percent of the data I needed..."

"Can you get the rest from her?"

"No, she's toughened herself against the memories. You were right. She was totally emotionless the whole way through. And did you notice how she moved?"

"Like she wasn't in pain... but those bullets can puncture skin, even if they _are_ designed for urban pacification. And the bruises too, and the amount she exerted herself... she wasn't walking in a perfectly straight line, and judging from that _and_ the smack across the head she got, she's probably got concussion. She'll be dazed for the next week or so. That, on top of everything else... she should have been screaming every time she moved."

At the world 'screaming', Syndrome drew the file back to him and turned to the last page.

"I think that's the key to this whole thing, somehow," he said slowly, and Nikolaevsky once more admired the way how the Boss could so quickly pick out the important facts from any given situation. "It says here, Harker's second-to-last transmission, that he finally got her to scream. He was quite pleased with that. Said he'd try the new method again at some point in the future, though not immediately. A month or less later, and he's dead. Whatever he did that one time, it broke her."

"How long was she with him?"

"Eight months, give or take."

Nikolaevsky nodded, impressed. "That's a long time. She withstood him well."

"Yes... he was a genius, but totally insane. When she didn't scream within the first month or so, he made it an additional target to achieve before the project ended. If I can just figure out how he finally broke her... how he got her to scream... than I know how to make her talk." He paused, and he frowned, trying to wrap his mind around the idea. "But trying to make her scream again won't be of any use this time. How can I find out...?"

Nikolaevsky shrugged, feeling his heavy body armour move easily over his broad shoulders. This was outside of his area of expertise. He'd done his job; he'd taken his sergeants, captains and lieutenants and made sure they'd operated well enough to take her down. And then he'd gone to get her himself, wary of her even in unconsciousness.

She'd been so light it was scary. She should have been solid and weighty, heavy with muscle, but she was like a paper doll. He'd noticed something else, too, when she'd showcased her impressive scars: the muscle on her frame was too well-defined, the thin skin hugging every ripple. There was no excess flesh on her at all, highlighted by the fact that the halter top she wore showed her breasts to be so very small. She needed to put on weight and fast, but she wasn't going to. It was not Nikolaevsky's place to see prisoners made fit and healthy.

"So Harker's made her torture-proof. With respect, sir, how do you intend to get her to talk when she's made herself immune to pain? Nothing you can do could match what Harker did to her."

The Boss leaned back in his chair and folded his fingers behind his head, sighing as he tilted the chair on its back legs.

"She's gonna be a tricky one," he said, and Nikolaevsky got the impression the Boss was simply musing out loud. "She withstood in eight months what would have taken a non-super down in days. Nothing the guards can do in terms of conventional torture would work. You were right on that front. So I'll simply have to think up more... _persuasive_, inventive methods to get her to release the information."

All four legs of the chair landed on the floor as the Boss turned to face him properly.

"Nikolaevsky, I _need_ that information. I need to know how she found this base, and quickly, so I can hide us better, before her accomplice drags the NSA and Russian government down on our asses."

Nikolaevsky had never seen the boss look so tense. His eyes were pensive, his shoulders drawn together, his spine taught with torque. His hands were laced together in front of his face, his body hunching over them slightly.

"Do you feel for her?" the Boss asked at last, blue eyes pinning Nikolaevsky to the chair. Nikolaevsky frowned.

"Of course. She's young and hurting. I'd think there was something wrong with me if I didn't."

The Boss looked surprised, and suspicious at his answer. "You think that's acceptable behaviour for a Commander toward his prisoner?"

Nikolaevsky frowned again and shrugged, his professional pride rattled a little. "Yes. The first step to understanding your enemy is feeling for them. But I will always recognise her as an enemy — I just want to understand how she works. That's as good a way of figuring out the information you need from her as any."

"Do what you can, then," the Boss said at last, leaning back again and tiredly rubbing a hand across his face. "Do what you can."

Nikolaevsky recognised the dismissal when he heard it. He nodded and stood, and closed the door behind him as he left.

--I--

Violet tried to keep focused in the present and the task at hand, but she was finding it so hard when her mind kept trying to drag her back to the past and into a series of memories she'd labelled as 'off-limits' years ago.

The guards had 'escorted' her back to the cell she'd been in previously and the forcefield had muted all sound. Experimentally, she'd flicked a small shield towards the forcefield, and the shield had simply dissolved.

Violet was left in there, sat cross-legged on the floor, practising breathing techniques to keep the terror at bay. It sat in her chest, trying to claw upwards, but she kept it firmly chained down. Panic would not help her. Not now, not ever. Besides, the calm focus needed for the breathing meant she kept her eyes closed, blocking off the curious stares of the many passers-by in the cold-floored hallway outside. But, as she had found over the years, the silence bade things rise that should have stayed buried. Memories kept slipping sideways into her mind, treacherously, helping along the migraine she knew to be starting.

Her hand crept into her pocket, hidden from sight of the four guards outside of the cell. Pretending to cough, she slipped two pills into her mouth, one broken in half. She dry-swallowed them, feeling their unpleasant dryness stick in her throat.

She moved her hands back to their limp positions in her lap and focused on her breathing again, waiting for the painkillers' primary and side effects to kick in, relief and drowsiness respectively. Too late, she remembered that she was nursing concussion and needed to stay awake for the next few hours to ensure no permanent damage. Oh, well. If she didn't wake up, they wouldn't mind.

Violet shifted her mind to the future, forcibly dragging it from the past. Escape prospects: minimal, but she had talents Syndrome had yet to discover. Hopefully, Zharov would manage to get an emergency message to some higher-ups who could send in the cavalry for her.

Still trying to figure a way out of this mess, she lay down and cushioned her arm under her head as she felt the migraine recede and her eyelids weight down. Everything she'd been through in the last few hours caught up with her then: the taxation she'd put on her muscles, the emotional trauma, the amount of energy she put into keeping her mind clear and memories at bay, the side-effects of the painkiller — they all formed into a giant black hole that she fell down, smooth and easy as butter, and into sleep. And she dreamed, memories she thought were locked away.

_She taps her wrist once, twice, three times. Mission Completed. Ground control, I'm coming home. She slips along the corridors, ghostly and silent, and leaves the shouting behind her as she heads up and away._

_At least, she thinks she's heading to freedom. Three corridors up, six heavy hands grasp her and drag her through a doorway._

_Violet struggles, phases out, trying to trick these aggressors. But they have firm grasps on her — both arms, a shoulder, her throat. She realises the futility of her actions despite the terror making her heart thump like a bass drum, so she doesn't expend any more energy on invisibility. Phasing back in, she observes the room around her. It's reasonably well-lit, a simple four walls of bland grey metal. Except there is a man stood a little way away, white lab coat, back to her._

_He turns, and she recognises the man instantly — dark-brown hair with grey threads, rimless glasses, kind eyes and a welcome smile that invites trust. Harker. The man she'd been sent here to foil._

"_Ah," he says pleasantly, looking up and down Violet's struggling form, one finger idly tapping a clipboard. "I did wonder if they'd get you in time. The heat sensors I designed for their helmets, I'm afraid, are a little temperamental." __He taps his mouth thoughtfully with the edge of the clipboard in his hand, looking her over contemplatively._

"_How did you know?" she gasps, fighting for air past the constricting, gloved hand at the base of her throat. Harker smiles again, like a college professor who's just been asked an intelligent question by a student._

"_Well, I need a super. So I set up my project, and leaked just a few details out, enough to get noticed by the... oh, what's it called..." He snaps his fingers a few times, looking mildly annoyed. "Oh, yes... the Supers' Alliance. I knew they'd send in an 'agent' too see what was going on, and judging for their need for stealth, I figured they'd send_ you_, little Invisigirl."_

_Violet starts at hearing the sound of her super's name. Harker notices, and laughs. "Oh, your exploits are on the news almost every day, my dear. It was an obvious line of logical thought to follow. So I set up a fake experiment — the glassware downstairs — and simply waited for you to 'drop in', as it were."_

_Violet tries struggling again, but the hands holding her are harder and harsher than metal. And besides, everything about Harker bespeaks kind benevolence — he won't hurt her. Not really._

_He takes off his glasses and polishes them on a corner of his spotless lab coat, still smiling that benign, heartfelt smile. He puts them back on and nods at the three guards who are holding her._

"_We'd best start," he says mildly. "Don't want to waste any of our sponsor's money, and we have research to conduct..."_

Oh, this is _ridiculous_, _Violet thinks, and pushes backwards suddenly, phasing out. She turns unexpectedly in the guards' grips, pushes, and their hold on her breaks, not expecting her sudden change of attack. Invisible, she drops and rolls and is sprinting out of the doorway before any of them have picked themselves up to follow her._

_She's running with a long, regular pace now, highly irritated that she'd walked into such a trap. She'll have_ words _with Agent Dicker when she gets ba–_

_There's a sudden pressure around her waist and she crashes to the floor. She's been tackled by one of those grey-clad guards. So she rolls out from under him, getting her breath back, and wraps herself in a shield as a storm of bullets hits it. Phasing out, she drops and spins and remembers too late that the guards' helmets have heat sensors. She can't fight, her powers are too defensive, and she simply hasn't the physical strength._

When I get out of this I'm hitting the gym, _she grouses as she legs it up a corridor._

_Ahead of her, she spies more guards pouring down the corridor towards her. Her irritation steps up to alarm. But she forces a corridor of shield right through their ranks and continues, unmolested, along the hallway. She's through the thick of them now, she can see the entrance she sneaked in by, so she ups her pace._

_But she's let her focus on the guards slip, and just before her foot can land on the tarmac of the outside world, one hand slips around her waist, another over her mouth and a voice in her ear whispers "Gotcha"._

_Everything goes black._

_When it clears, she finds herself clamped with metal restraints to a chair in the same room she had run so quickly from. Harker is standing over her with a needle and the air of a man happy in his work. He notices her return to consciousness._

"_Ah, back with us," he says pleasantly, tapping the top of the bore of the needle professionally. "Good."_

_The alarm in Violet has long since evolved into true terror. She's captive, held prisoner by this madman with smiling eyes and she has no idea what he intends to do to her._

"_I must make my first report," he murmurs absently to himself, before moving his eyes from the needle to Violet's own. "Lean your head back, please, " he says pleasantly._

_Violet refuses to move. She stares at him in equal parts anger, horror and confusion. He sighs and rubs his forehead with his free hand._

"_So you're going to be difficult. I_ did _say 'please', you know." Harker's tone is of rueful resignation. He nods at one of the guards behind her and a strong hand grasps her by the jaw, manipulating her head backwards, exposing her throat to this madman with a needle and trustful face._

_Instinctively, she throws up a shield. The guard is caught inside with her, but it means that Harker can't get to her._

_She sees him nod to the guard, and the hand at her jaw is joined by another. It slips down to her throat and presses. Her airway is locked off, and she immediately begins to struggle for breath. A grey mist fades into her vision as consciousness begins to slip away from her. The shield around her dissolves._

_Immediately, the fingers about her throat are withdrawn and replaced by the splayed hand of Harker. Semiconscious, Violet tries to regain enough presence of mind to throw up another shield, but she can't quite manage it._

_Harker's face is totally studious, and intensely focused. His gaze is on her right collarbone, and the rubber-gloved hand over her throat pulls the skin taut, just a little. Then the needle in his other hand has punched through the cloth and the skin and is sunk to the hilt in her flesh. It hurts; oh God, it hurts. He must have hit a nerve, perhaps intentionally, and the only thing that stops her struggling or making sound is the fact she's not entirely conscious. Then the needle is removed, the muscle under her collarbone singing its pain._

"_There," he says, satisfied, capping the needle and putting it in his breast pocket._

_The hands are removed from Violet and she straightens up, coughing harshly as air finally floods her lungs. The grey across her vision clears and she finds strength enough to glare at Harker, who is now making notes of a clipboard._

"_What was that?" she demands, not quite keeping a tremor of fear from her voice. Harker looks up._

"_It's a little creation of my own," he says with pride. "It's a heavy combination of dopamine and psychotropic medications. It will induce confusion and a sense of loss of contact with reality. It'll keep you tamed whilst we sort out the start of the experiment."_

_Terror floods through Violet. Her breathing panics, her heart rate rockets and she's aware she's shaking._

"_What then?" she whispers, and Harker's smile broadens._

"_Then I get to start my research! Oh, don't_ worry _so, little Thirty-four. I will look after you, have no fear of _that...

_And suddenly the dream stops being a memory; she's aware she's lived this before and she struggles, fighting to rise from the dream — images of things to come in those eight months of imprisonment flash before her eyes, blood and black, dark and suppression, screams that never heard the air. And one that did._

She wakes with her hands pressed against her mouth to hold the scream in.

--I--

The next four days passed in a strange, unrealistic way. Violet felt as though she were looking down on her body, like a balloon on a string. Every day the guards came for her, led her away to a white interrogation room, asked her questions over and over and over.

She felt herself slowly draw further and further away from her body. The blows and kicks ceased to register even as pressure, the questions stopped having any meaning for her. Her skin was totally numb, devoid of feeling, and her mind felt the same way. She didn't even have to fight to keep her memories away now. She'd put them, along with herself, in a box buried so deep she wasn't entirely sure she'd find it again.

But she still dreamed, alone in her silent cell. Sometimes she didn't even need sleep to dream. Whatever locks and restrictions she kept on her past, whatever grave she buried it in, they rose to terrorise her once more when she was alone and defenceless. But they had no coherency; they were often just a confused mash of fear and terror of something around her, all around her — nearly within reach of her, so close, so close, so frightening. Flashbacks and nightmares, all twined in with her conscious moments.

She had no more migraines. At least, she assumed she didn't. Her body didn't feel her own: her nerves were mute, her mind silent, her synapses devoid of energy — a powerless grid. Her powers were entombed deep inside her, deemed useless for now and a weakness that would reveal her identity without getting her any closer to escape.

Violet had gone someplace in her head, and the feeble attempts at torture the guards were using were not enough to drag her back. Harker had known what to do, yes he had. Harker had known how to keep her sentient, known what buttons to press. It had been his job, after all, and his genius extended in many directions. But these guards had never had to get information from anyone before and they didn't know any of a body's weak spots. They assumed blows and kicks to be sufficient, that blunt pain was motivator enough. They just didn't know — they'd had no instruction in psychological methods. They were ineffective. And they knew it. Her stare was blank and focused at the middle distance. She did not move of her own volition, and would often lie in the same position for the few rest hours she had over that ninety-six hour period. When she did move it was mechanical, motion remembered in limbs that had no connection to the brain.

Once a day she was escorted to another room where she was presented with a white, crumbly block of essential proteins and carbohydrates, and water. She was allowed to use the bathroom there, a spartan affair consisting of a toilet and a sanitisation liquid dispenser. Overall, it was the very basic stuff she needed to keep operating, and could never satisfy hunger or thirst. But she still didn't eat unless forced, didn't drink unless coerced. It was evident that something needed to be done — that she would continue like this, silent and unresponsive, until she died.

So, once again, Nikolaevsky and his Boss found themselves in a conference room on opposite sides of the desk. Nikolaevsky was peeling an apple with a knife from his belt, intent on getting the skin off in one long spiral. The Boss allowed this because he knew that giving Nikolaevsky something to do with his hands was the best way of getting him to think.

"She's totally unresponsive," remarked Nikolaevsky, staring intently at the apple, face drawn into an unconscious focused scowl. The Boss' face creased into a frown.

"She's dead inside," he corrected flatly, tapping his fingers on the surface of the table, his chin resting in his other hand. He stared moodily off into the middle distance, eyes flickering as if over unseen lines of text. "It's like she's not there any more. And she was pretty vacant to begin with."

"Problem," said Nikolaevsky shortly, still concentrating on his apple, a corner of his tongue stuck out of the side of his mouth. The Boss watched him in part exasperation and part amusement. Nikolaevsky was a _highly_ intelligent man, but only when he needed to be. The deep muscle, thickset form and six-feet eight-inches frame didn't give the impression of an advanced military thinker, but that was one of Nikolaevsky's advantages. He was quite deceptive. But he could also be exceptionally dense at times, and quite _amazingly_ childlike.

The Boss turned back to the file on the table in front of him. The papers inside had been organised into piles on the desk by date, the photos arranged in chronological order. They were shots of bloody patterns, skin rent by a gleaming blade (thin, threatening, lightweight: a surgical scalpel). There were shots of a person lying immobile and bleeding on the floor, long dark hair obscuring their face. And there was a shot of the same person lying flat on a steel table, rips in her unidentifiable costume showing what the others did not — a long row of needle tracks under the right collarbone.

The Boss tapped that one thoughtfully, eyes flicking over it. There was still something about this girl, E-S Thirty-four... something he hadn't picked up on, but which niggled at the back of his mind like an itch that couldn't be scratched, like words on the tip of the tongue that wouldn't flow. It would help if he knew her super's codename, but it didn't matter too much. 'Thirty-four' would suffice. She couldn't escape. If she could, she would have done so by now, which begged the question: _how did she get in here in the first place?_

Nikolaevsky had started to cut the apple into slices, unmindful of his Boss' silent cogitation, the cogs in his own mind whirring away at the subconscious level. But then, there was a pause in that smooth cerebration and he stopped, placing the half-sliced apple down on the table next to the long coil of green skin. There was something carefully pregnant in his silence.

The Boss looked up, aware that his Commander's brainwaves were often good ones. Despite his capacity for unmediated violence, Nikolaevsky had a keen, instinctive grasp of psychology and motivation. This had been especially evident in his unexpected answer about how he felt about the girl, and how it was the key to understanding — and breaking — her.

The Boss often wondered if Nikolaevsky was a closet psychotic.

"What if –" Nikolaevsky began, and fell silent, light-brown eyes flicking oddly across the room. The Boss said nothing, giving him time to form the idea in his mind. "What if," said Nikolaevsky slowly, "we're going about this the wrong way. I don't mean the torture," he said, anticipating the Boss' reaction. "We knew from the start it would be ineffective. I mean the way we're thinking about it."

Intrigued by his Commander's answer, the Boss leaned further over the desk.

"We've assumed that we can get through to her using torture. Something clever. Something new. Something _direct_." Nikolaevsky paused again, brow furrowing slightly. "We've removed all aspects of personal involvement — torture, questions. She's used to it. What if we... added a personal touch? One of us offering comfort for answers, rather than torture for silence..." he trailed off again, but this had been enough to start the seeds of an idea in the Boss' brain. Nikolaevsky, rising from his contemplative fog, saw the boyish sparkle and the grin in the corners of his lips.

"You got something, Boss?"

"Maybe. Harker's notes said she was more... _susceptible_ to his methods when faced with him directly. You might just have a point..."

--I--

Violet lay, curled up, on the floor of her cell.

Her mind was somewhere far away — she'd disconnected from the pain and the sensation, and all she was aware of was a slight chill nipping at her feet. But then something broke the routine she'd become used to over the last few days — the forcefield behind her briefly turned off, and turned on again.

So she closed her eyes and pushed energy through her body. Warmth spread right through to her fingertips and bruises began to smart, her hunger made itself fully known and the dull throbbing in the side of her face started up again. She opened her eyes again and sat up, blinking in the light from the corridor.

The man she recognised as Nikolaevsky was leaning against the wall of her cell with his arm folded across his chest, watching her with a completely closed-off expression.

Violet sat cross-legged and rested her hands in her lap, watching Nikolaevsky without emotion. They stayed this way for about sixty seconds, each daring the other to make the first move. Violet had the advantage in this: she was used to quietly watching people.

Nikolaevsky said, without warning that he was going to speak, "This is the deal. You can come out of the cell at anytime. We will give you food, a bed, medical care. The job offer will still stand."

Violet didn't respond. There was going to be a catch — Nikolaevsky, a man who apparently controlled the guard forces around Syndrome's base, would not offer this unless he wanted something in return, and probably at Syndrome's instruction.

"At any time, if you decide you'll tell us what we need to know, you can have these things straight away. If you continue with your silence, you will stay in here for as long as is necessary." Nikolaevsky gave her an appraising look for a couple of seconds. "Don't answer now — take some time to think on it. I'm sure you'll see how good an offer this is after a couple of hours."

Violet immediately filed that under 'deeply suspicious'.

Nikolaevsky turned away from her and gave the nod to a guard beyond the shield. For a moment the shield disappeared and Nikolaevsky took a moment to step through while guns were trained at Violet. Another nod, and the shield was reinstated. Violet watched as Nikolaevsky held a silent conversation with one of the guards stationed outside her cell, shield blocking out any noise. Then, some kind of conclusion reached, Nikolaevsky strode away without a backwards glance.

The shield flickered, and then was highlighted by a very faint blue line. Violet stared at it fixedly for a moment before realising what it was. It was the same light she'd seen on the way in here; the strange one which filtered the warm air and made it cold. But the one here was much, much fainter — she could only really see it in her peripheral vision, and there were no obvious effects as of yet.

Violet gave the heat filter a fixed glare before standing, a little oddly. Her sense of balanced ebbed and flowed, and her vision tilted accordingly. Through the shifting sense of gravity, she rewired her internal gyroscope in a confused moment, focusing through closed eyelids. When she opened her eyes again, her body was strung so tight that the lightest touch would have snapped the thin cables she'd used to bind her thoughts together. But she was balanced, frugally in control and totally steady.

She moved the few steps toward the back of the cell, and then moved her hands above her head to grip the edge of the ventilation slot. Her legs were braced awkwardly at the foot of the sloping concrete, body following the angle of the gradient. The concrete under her fingers, under the flat six-inch deep stretch of ventilation slot, was cool and gritty. The air inside, however, was chilling fairly rapidly and a quick glance to her hands showed a hint of pale blue phosphoresce reflecting from her nails.

Bracing her palms on the sloping concrete underneath the slit, Violet allowed herself a breath before pushing away. She moved to sit at the base of the slope, her knees buckling with a welcome she knew betrayed the fatigue in her joints.

It didn't take a genius to figure out their aim: they were never intending to give her free choice, they were planning to freeze her until she gave in. So she sat there for a moment, clad only in base layers, ever so vulnerable to the chill she knew would eventually permeate the entire cell.

She tentatively felt for her back pocket. Yes, her socks and gloves were still in there. With fingers that felt rusty and sawblade-edged, she dragged them onto her feet and hands. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. Violet shuffled herself as far away from the shield-turned-filter as she could manage before the cell floor sloped upwards and took stock — once more — of her situation.

Syndrome's base: what exactly was he planning? It was safe to say it couldn't be anything good, judging by the stocks and shares flying across the screen in the HQ-room, and the fact that Syndrome considered research like Harker's worth funding. So that cut taking Nikolaevsky's offer right out of the options. Choice number two: could she get out of here? Not without Zharov's help, she supposed, or backup of some kind. And she could not rely on that. She didn't even know if Zharov had made it back to their crashed helicopter, that metal angel fallen from grace.

Which only left one alternative — freeze to death. Violet considered this, staring at her hands — bloody and bruised, a long purple-green line of crushed flesh over each set of knuckles. How long would she last? Would it matter?

For a moment, she rested her forehead on her knees, drawn up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. She felt the faintest lowering of the air temperature in her fingers and tucked her hands into the gap between her knees and her chest. She stayed like that for as long as she could, before the cold seeping into the cell forced her into a foetal ball.

Violet exhaled once, deeply. The guards didn't hear her make another noise after that.

--I--

The cold crept into her skin slowly and stealthily, like an intruder with nowhere else to go. It numbed her flesh with paralytical force and she shivered sporadically, brief bursts of harsh trembling that came and went. It didn't take long for her breath to become visible on the air, and the short gasps of breath became smaller and smaller as her cardiovascular system responded to the cold, slowing down.

Violet was huddled in as tight a ball as she could manage with her back to the filter, drifting in and out of what might have been sleep or unconsciousness. The cold was a constant presence, a numbing balm in the air which totally destroyed any muscle control she might have had. Her hands were tucked into the cavity between her thighs and chest, under her chin, wrapped around each other like twin kittens. Her nose was pressed in the gap between her two knees. Her breathing was steadily getting more and more shallow and her shivering had upped a notch, a low-level shuddering that was slowly becoming more pronounced as the temperature dropped. Every now and then her eyes would open and she would be aware of the warmth and comfort behind her, pastel walls and deep carpet beyond the laminate expanse of the cell corridor.

The cold wasn't just in her body; it had crept through to her mind. Everything was just beyond reach, her thinking coated with a foggy, pearly greyness. She couldn't think in words anymore, that part of her brain had seized up. She thought in half-remembered images, incomplete memories, faint emotions which struggled in their confines. But they were all fading away, disappearing like the skyline into dense fog as her boat took her further and further out to sea. She was barely conscious now, only semi-awake.

Something in her, something small and whipped and sobbing, didn't let her black out completely. _You won't wake up,_ it cried desperately. _It's too cold! You'll sleep and never wake up! No! NO!_

And then even that little part of her was silenced in the oppressive fog and all that was left was her memories. They attacked her, fragment at a time, and she couldn't remember where she was, exactly. Was she in Harker's lab, or a cold cell in a strange place? She didn't know. Either of them were possible.

Violet was too cold to twitch, to move, to moan under the onslaught of remembrance. There was no pain, there never was in dreams, but there was fear, strangely dumbed down. A heavier terror that had sunk down, like lead, a dread that never dissipated: a terror that had submerged itself under her skin, marrow-deep, and become part of the bone.

Some time later, perhaps a few hours, her shivering began to ease off. Her breathing was no longer noticeable, and her muscles unclenched slightly from their former tension. Inside her mind, Violet succumbed to the cold. She curled into the mist, and fell away.

--I--

Outside the cell, watching these changes carefully, the Boss cast a worried glance at Nikolaevsky.

"She's near the end. I honestly thought this would work."

"Me too, Boss. Guess she's just so determined to protect what she knows."

"How long do we have before the damage becomes irreversible?"

"Fifteen minutes or so. Temperature in the cell has dropped a fair amount. Below freezing."

The Boss sighed and passed a hand through his hair, watching the recumbent figure in the cell. "I guess the bad-cop part of the plan didn't work."

"Do you think the 'good cop' part will?" The inverted commas dropped neatly into place with unmissable sarcasm. The Boss threw a dirty look at Nikolaevsky and his distaste for American idioms.

"No. And I still think we're approaching this the wrong way. You were correct. We're not thinking about it right... and it needs to be more personal. It needs to be more about her... and I need to know what happened to break her." The Boss rubbed his forehead in an absentminded gesture of frustration. "And we need to find out soon, before the concussion heals up. At the moment, she's probably a bit hazy, not thinking clearly, more open to suggestion. Once that window is gone... there'll be no chance I could get her to tell me what I need to know."

Nikolaevsky shrugged, eyes elsewhere, and the Boss despaired of the man's attention span. "You could always ask her," he suggested, leaning back against a dividing wall between two cells. He took out a large hunting knife from his belt and began to clean his nails.

It took Nikolaevsky about a minute to realise that his Boss had not replied. He looked up, slightly unnerved, so see a spark in the Boss' eyes he had never seen before. And when the Boss spoke, it was in a careful, flat monotone that suggested he'd just had an idea that was so perfect it did not warrant exuberance.

"I could just ask her," he agreed, a carefully bland expression on his face, eyes riveted on the frozen figure. "I could just ask her."

"Boss?"

"You were so right. We approached this from entirely the wrong angle. Getting her to tell me what I need to know, _forcing_ her, isn't the target. The target is getting her to a point where she tells me of her own free will. Not to _drive_ her, but... to tell me because she feels she needs to. To make it _personal_."

There was more than a touch of distaste on that last word, prompting Nikolaevsky to frown suspiciously. "You're not making much sense, Boss. She's our _prisoner_, something she's not going to forget."

"No... not any more she's not," said the Boss, still with that flat smile, and motioned a guard towards him. "Here's what I need you to bring me. Quickly..."

* * *

_To be continued._


	7. vii

It requires more courage to suffer than to die.  
_- Napoleon Bonaparte_

* * *

There was air in Violet's mouth and in her lungs, warm air with gentle taste, a sensation her body desperately craved. It landed on her frozen tongue and swirled into her body, heating her a little, and she fancied she heard her lungs creak as they expanded further than they had done in the last three hours.

There was a pause and the air slipped from her body. She wanted it back, wanted the warm current pushing insistently into her chest. For a moment it was before it, too, was exhaled.

The warmth filtered through the tissue of her lungs and into her internal organs, and her core temperature jumped a couple of degrees as her cardiovascular systems and metabolism started up again from their hibernating states. The air itself hit her bloodstream and, in turn, hit her brain. Now there was coherence enough to ask, _air? Warmth?_ but no more, because the icicles that fringed her thinking slowed it up. She could process sensation (such as the strange pressure on her lips) but nothing complex like her own name.

Violet's lungs inhaled deep of their own accord, a gasp of icy-cold air, and the tingling oxygen smashed into her body with ruthless abandon. Slowly, laboriously, like great machines unfolding and cycling up, everything in her body began the return journey to normal efficiency. Her heart thumped extra loud, her lungs expanded enough to make her chest rise and fall, and her nerves were plugged back into the mains socket of her brain. But there was still some way to go; her muscles were leaden and unresponsive. She tried to move her body – anything. But no, she was totally numb. The coldness had robbed her of all feeling. It was still so cold.

Then there was a feeling – a strange one. There was a sensory void and then, seconds later, she became aware of something. It was like a sunrise in her skin, a crescendo of noise, an unexpected scent; it started out as nothing... and then she had the feeling that something was touching her through the material covering her arm. This was odd in itself as her skin was so numb as to be desensitised to touch, but then that became warmth, which spread and spread and spread. It was only warm – not hot – but the sensation on her nearly-frostbitten skin was akin to volcanic ash that burned her alive.

She craved it.

It disappeared for a moment, and then the most unexpected thing happened; something that jolted her brain and sped her toward wakefulness: she was moved, suddenly and without warning, but with undisguised gentleness. There were two arms around her – one under her knees, the other under her shoulders – and a biceps like teak that cradled her head towards a chest. She was being lifted. And then she felt the warmth again and it was all over her, all around her, a strange softness against one cheek and the smooth material of a shirt under the other. Violet breathed even deeper and that gentle taste was in her nose and throat again, stronger and softly undefinable. It was warm and clean and touched with the flavour of cotton – a homely smell that she didn't realise was out-of-place.

The sudden influx of cold air underneath the calming scent, however, was like a surge of amphetamines. Her heart rate doubled again in speed and volume and her mind touched surface, bringing her to a state where she could accept that she was nearly fully awake. With the fresh warmth came fresh awareness of how cold she was and her shivering started anew.

She opened her eyes. There was an expanse of white shirt in front of her. She knew this was so, because she could see the buttons with eyes that felt overstrained. She shut her eyes briefly as a hand gently moved a strand of hair out of her face and stroked down her cheek, carefully, kindly. She didn't feel its warmth – her skin of her face was still too numb – but she appreciated the gesture with a desperation she had never expected of herself.

Violet opened her eyes again and saw herself to be wrapped in a light-grey merino blanket. The hand on her leg, supporting her lower body on the arm underneath it, was just visible. A person. Definitely a person, not her imagination trying to make the transition from frozen to dead as easy as possible. So she looked upwards, feeling her locked-up joints fight every movement.

A face looked down on her, so close. Blue eyes, serious jaw, solemn mouth, a flip of orange-greyed hair falling across his left eye. She knew that face and she knew she ought to be scared, but there was no _room_ for scared in her mind; the mechanisms of her brain were still thawing. And besides, Syndrome's eyes looked down on her with a compassion she hadn't seen in years, a gentleness to his smile and a softness in his eyes that she hadn't been on the receiving end of for so long.

He'd wanted something... a little while ago. Wanted something from her, but she couldn't give it. She hoped he didn't ask again. She was pretty sure she couldn't give it this time, either.

"Tell me about Harker," he said, in a low voice that bordered on a whisper. Violet felt the reverberation of his voice against her skin.

Her eyes drifted shut for a moment. She licked her lips, cold sandpaper across cracked skin. This one she could answer for him.

"All right," she whispered, vocal cords beyond use, and greyed out a little bit.

Violet was dimly aware of being carried – the g-force was evident in her stomach as she was properly lifted up, and then there was the rhythmic motion of movement. She measured this in terms of Syndrome's heartbeat, which was a strong and heavy systole-diastole against her ear. After a short while she became aware that they had entered a room; a small room, to judge by the way Syndrome's footsteps didn't echo.

Cracking her eyes open slightly, she observed the four white, brightly-lit walls with a dulled torpor and closed them again. The light continued to illuminate the insides of her eyelids, a dull glowing red, but as she slipped in and out of wakefulness she never noticed. But she _did_ notice how the grip on her body changed, and she felt herself being laid down on a surface – a table, possibly, raised slightly at one end, well-padded.

The air about her was very warm, she noted, feeling the unfamiliar heat enter her body as she breathed in; there was the strange sensation of blood burning through the veins in her chest. It began the slow business of properly waking her limbs up. They tingled, the new warmth a flush of feeling in her arms and fingers that left them with the dead sensation of pins and needles. They tingled and throbbed in turns, sharp prickly pain dissolving into bass-drum aches and back again.

Violet's breathing became more regular, deeper. Her mind was thawing fast now, shedding its ice coating, synapses blinking into life like isolated fairylights. She was thinking on better level, on higher tiers – the warmth invigorated her. But she was still so cold; the chill had crept into her flesh and stayed there, like the permafrost that refuses to melt even on a warm spring day. Her arms were unresponsive, the joints locked solid. Her legs were even worse; the muscle itself was seemingly a solid block of ice. But, oddly enough, there was some feeling in her shoulderblades. Not much, but some, and there was more than enough sensation there for Violet to feel a hand slip under her back and lift her slightly. There was a brief, complicated moment of positions being shifted, and then she was leaning back at a comfortable angle again, about halfway between lying flat and sitting up.

Against a chest, she realised a moment later. The back of her head was resting on the muscle of a chest. And then, inspired by the warm contact, the nerves in her back flared spectacularly to life. She was, from the small of her back to her head, leaning against Syndrome – his chin was a little way above the top of her head, and there was a long leg on either side of hers. Her lower body remained on the flat table so she was an angle, bent at the waist, back rising from the flat plane that Syndrome was sitting on, following the line of his torso. And his arms were carefully pulling the blanket away. She wanted to protest; she needed the blanket, _needed_ it, or all would go cold again.

Violet cracked her eyes again to find the level of light in the room had been at least halved. It was lower, warmer, more comfortable – less stark. And speaking of _warmer_ – the loud heat coming from Syndrome had finally made its way through two or three layers of material and reached Violet's back. The nerves there sang its praise in coded electrical impulses all the way to her brain which passed the joy on out to the rest of her body, her central nervous system a network of red-hot wires that communicated this new heat to every part of her body. This electrical burn began to seep through to her muscles, which in turn began to pound in a low-steady unison. Not so much pain, more of a subtle reminder that they had recently undergone an ordeal, but they were getting over it.

There was a soft noise, a sound she couldn't put her finger to, until a glass appeared in her hazy line of vision. It was brought up to her mouth and her instincts took over when her brain failed to process it. She drank.

The water was warm and gave her her dexterity back, settling easily into the aches between her joints. The ice fell from her fingers and she could move her arms again, bringing up a hand to grasp the warm glass and tip it a little further, neck straining to raise her head slightly. Syndrome's hand, larger, thicker, furnace-hot, helped her hold it without spilling any through her shivering.

Her head fell back against Syndrome's chest when he took the empty glass away. Her breathing was easier, her shivering slowing down, and the furnace heat of Syndrome instated along her back was beginning to raise her body temperature with a slow inevitability. There was a brief movement under her body as Syndrome put the glass somewhere and Violet finally made the complete transition into wakefulness. She was still tired, nothing would change that, but her thinking was up to speed. She'd made a commitment to something, to Syndrome. Something she could honour. So why hadn't he said anything?

But then she felt fingers at her waist, a hand on either side, gripping the hem of her long-sleeved tee. The heat of flesh-to-flesh contact was almost more than she could bear, his knuckles on her sides – he must have been _burning_ inside to be that hot. Then she realised: _no. He's normal. I'm just too cold._

His hands moved upwards carefully, bringing her top with it. She resisted the movement, uncertain at what Syndrome was playing at, but too tired to form any kind of coherent argument against it. She had some feeling that this was part of the deal – part of the agreement owed to her when she accepted his demands – but she couldn't figure out why.

"Trust me," murmured his voice, just above her. "Don't worry. Trust me."

Could she trust him? What was he _doing?_

What was there to lose by doing so?

So Violet arched her back wearily, the simple action tiring her more than she liked, and raised her arms so that Syndrome could remove her t-shirt. She was left her in her black sports halter, still wondering at what he was doing. She steadfastly did not look down. She didn't need to see what she already knew to be there.

There was a pause and she could feel the tendons in his neck ripple and the muscle under her back shift as he looked to his right, arm stretching to grasp something. She didn't bother turning to look. She'd find out in due course.

Then she jumped again – a record loss of control for her, twice in as many minutes – when Syndrome began to firmly wipe a warm, damp cloth down her right arm. It lifted the blood and the dirt and he crossed his other arm over her stomach, length of limb allowing him this liberty, to raise her forearm so that he could peel off her gloves and gently clean to the tips of her fingers. The skin, warmed and cleansed, tingled pleasantly at the fresh sensation. Blood began to make its way to the surface, heating her flesh, but it was nothing compared to the burn of touch, a simple necessity she'd been denied for a good while. By herself, by others, by so many – it had been so long that she couldn't remember a time when she'd been touched in kindness. It made her sad, and tired, and desperately craving this contact. It was enough to override the circuit in her mind that played a loop of '_This is Syndrome. He hurt your family. He hurt you. He hurt YOU._' The simple benevolence of his touch, not meant in anger or to wound, undermined her stability to a degree she found frightening. Here she was, at Syndrome's mercy, submitting to him, and she didn't care. There was no desire to fight, the first in a long time; just the desire to _be_.

The cloth travelled up toward her shoulder and began to carefully massage away the grime and the blood which lay sulkily on her skin like excess tar. The motion was unfamiliar in its tenderness as it gently stroked over bruises and half-healed wounds, but this did not dispel any of its relaxing properties. Violet found her muscles melting down, unwinding slowly. The tension abandoned her, leaving behind nothing but the dull ache of tendons that had been exerted too much.

This was all so... strange. The cloth deserted her skin for a moment and then he brought it back, slightly damper, and started afresh from her shoulder. It travelled sideways, smoothing across her right collarbone. His other hand, which had momentarily been used to raise her arm, was resting on the ball of her left shoulder. She fought hard not to shiver because of it.

_Touch. Contact._

"Tell me about Harker," said Syndrome in a low, absentminded voice. She felt the vibration through her back.

_Could I do that? Tell him?_ And, all at once, she was hit with the strange intimacy of the situation – the warmth, the sense of being totally surrounded, held and cared for, and realised that, yes, she could do it. As long as they remained as they were. Like this.

So Violet lay her head comfortably on his chest, eyes drifting shut, letting her body relax completely. She coughed, once, ascertaining the state of her throat and vocal cords. They were slow, stiff and rusty, but they would suffice.

She opened her mouth, and began to speak.

--I--

Agent Rick Dicker frowned at the message in his hand. He felt it wasn't being treated with the level of priority it deserved. "Give it a couple of days, then send out a small search crew," he considered, was not an appropriate response to a message with such urgency evident.

The Russian government had received an unpleasant surprise when a strange flying vehicle had wobbled into Noril'sk and nearly crash-landed. It was a bizarre amalgamation of two completely different types of helicopter, and inside were two shivering pilots and one man who had blazed with desperate indignation and an unnatural furnace-heat. The officials in charge had been informed, somewhat brusquely, that there was an American agent in trouble in a vast underground base located in the Taiga. When this had failed to garner any more interest than a pointed "So?", the man in question had then endeavoured to explain how an American civilian had set up shop illegally in same base. This had gotten the Russian government moving pretty swiftly and they'd shot off a memo to the NSA asking them if this was their case, and could they please lend a hand, as they'd been the ones to start this whole affair. There was a playground effrontery to it that Dicker found extremely distasteful – _but Mommy, the Americans started it!_ – but he thought this no reason to not immediately dispatch agents to get their own people out of there.

Dicker supposed it was the somewhat inflammatory nature of the message that had provoked the less-than-concerned response. The American missive essentially boiled down to a lazy dismissal that, when read between the lines, coalesced into _it's on your turf, YOU sort it out._

Dicker felt like banging his head on the desk, probably earning him a startled glance from the younger underlings working around him. Instead, he allowed himself a sigh and a moment of personal contemplation.

He'd fought the higher-ups on the matter, quite fiercely. Violet didn't need to be in that mess, and if she was in danger it was his job to get her out of it. The superiors' defence was more along the lines of that she was a super, able to take care of herself, and they really couldn't see to funding _another_ trip to Russia for a crew of rescuers on the department's already-stretched budget. There appeared to be no way around it.

He leaned back in his chair, passing a hand over his worn eyes, and tried to think like Violet would, Violet's style of tactics and observation, her way of fighting.

It was different, that was for sure... she'd never been a physically strong person but her after-time-Away training had helped level this imbalance somewhat. Her speed was the key to it all, though – that, combined with her invisibility traits, made her a ruthless opponent. She also, as he had noted before, had no qualms about taking more permanent measures to her problems if she did not see an alternative presented... if it was her or them, so to speak.

Dicker pulled up the security feeds on his computer and picked out a few specific times back when she was an Incredibles girl, the red and the black, the good and the bad. He watched her movements, trying to place them – careful, secure, cautious. Then he pulled up feeds from her more recent training sessions and visually compared the two results, mixing in the changes in her personality, and setting them against the backdrop of his memories of her.

Before she disappeared, she had been a clever fighter; she fought with a smoothness that was efficient and graceful, knocking out her captives with shields before turning them in. Now he saw how she'd learned savagery, that the cursiveness of her movement had not been lost but multiplied, juxtaposed with hand-to-hand fighting and sharp changes in the direction of her attacks. It was terrible and it was beautiful, efficiency mated with anger.

But he also realised how it affected her. This new ferocious cruelty, inhuman and vicious, was never intended to be a part of her character; nature had not devised her so. She had _made_ it a part of her nature, as humans were defined by what they _chose_ to do rather than what they were destined to become, but he also saw how she'd shed a little of herself along the way. It wasn't a good thing and it wasn't a bad thing. It was a slow and steady shift into being someone else, and he saw how scared and cowed she was of her own capacity to change.

A person's self-definitions helped to anchor them. She'd been forced to change how she defined herself (through whatever had happened), and now she was lost in a world she used to be so connected to. Alone and adrift, clinging desperately to her integrity and integrating her new gleaming savagery into her reactions. She'd tucked her old self away, turned to arms, and fought to self-destruct. She would drown in her own determination, she would implode, and she would never be found again. In every sense of the phrase.

_Looks like that might have started to happen already, old boy,_ he told himself wearily.

But that hadn't solved his question, which was "What would Violet do?"

It took him another ten minutes and two cups of coffee to figure out exactly what Violet would have done, and another twenty to make the arrangements.

He could be in Noril'sk by the end of the week.

--I--

"It was a mission, you see. A simple one, no big deal. Get in, get out, throw a spanner in the works. Easy, you know?

But it didn't work out like that. I was taken down almost as soon as I was in. He was expecting me. He'd _predicted_ me, had a guard force tailored to my strengths and weaknesses, a fake experiment as a lure. It worked well. The man was a genius. Sheer genius. And insane. He wasn't frothing at the mouth, but he didn't need to. He was frothing at the brain.

He doped me up, some combination of tranquillisers and neurotransmitters. It was like being trapped outside of my body's control panel, like being in a funhouse hall of mirrors but with the gravity constantly shifting. I couldn't focus enough to use my powers, and that's what he wanted. And when it cleared up, I was secured to a table, a vertical one, and he was holding a scalpel.

You've seen where it went from there, and I don't doubt you've got the reports. He needed blood, but he was curious too, like I was some new strand of human. How fast would I clot, how fast would I heal, would I scar, did it hurt, did it hurt as much _now_, would you look at that, she's blacked out, give her a direct shot of adrenaline. You get the picture.

As for the shapes... he was into the aesthetics. He liked twisty lines and strange, asymmetrical patterns, and I was one giant canvas. He only used the one medium, though.

It continued like so, pretty standard, for a couple of months. Long enough to get the scars you see here and here, stuff like that. See how shallow they are? After a while he got bored with it. Changed the style. Deep slashes like this one here, 'specially on my back. He liked the colour, he said. I think he was just having fun. There wasn't much research point to it. And it's not like he did it every day; maybe a couple of times a week. Enough to build up over time. He let his guards and his little trained minions do the rest. Tests, needles, shocks... Hell, whatever they felt like. He only took a personal interest in the _unusual_ tests, and always made sure they pleased him.

There were a lot of drug tests. He liked seeing me not in control, I think, because I managed a sense of self-containment most of the time. I never screamed, not once. I remember thinking that would mean I'd let him win, and that's what kept me going. For seven months. Over half a year. My eighteenth came and went in some part of that but he had me on so much crap I couldn't have told you what day it was. And not just the drugs – I had to fight every day to keep back the pain, keep the drugs from _keeping_ me controlling the pain. I refused to let him see me beaten.

That lasted about four months, I think. Then he broke my cheekbone. Properly, efficiently. He didn't just swing at my face with a length of lead pipe. That would have been 'amateurish', as he put it. But it hurt when he did it, the sort of pain that you just know is never gonna stop. Ever. And it didn't. I couldn't move at all, or the fractured bones would grind and I'd almost black out. In case you were wondering, the marrow was kind of sweet with a slatey edge.

He fixed it in the end, though, and he was gracious enough to knock me out for the surgery. He knew what might have happened if I'd gone into shock; like I said, the man was a genius. Ironically enough, the surgery didn't leave a scar. No, _this_ scar, the one on my face, came from someplace else.

The break made me realise that there was strong chance I wouldn't get out of there anytime soon, and most likely I'd leave in a bodybag. It changed my whole approach. It stopped being _how quickly can I get out of here_ and started being _how long can I survive this before he slips up and kills me?_

I stopped fighting as much, stopped resisting him, and stopped thinking that the agency would send someone in after me. I just began to focus on staying alive, and day after day, it got harder. I even started to wonder what the point was. But I still never screamed. I refused to give him the satisfaction.

But then... one day, the routine changed. He observed me closely, himself, for a week. At least, I think it was a week. I lost all perception of night and day and the passage of time. It was at least a few days, minimum four, 'cause that's how many times I was allowed to rest in the observation period.

Then he told me I was being given a full twenty-four hours in a monitored medical unit. This scared me _badly_. Anything and everything he presented to me that was intended to look like a grace period simply meant he was planning something big and he wanted my system cleared and my body rested for it. This was wrong.

I got those twenty-four hours. I was given carbs, proteins, vitamins, things like that, all intravenously. He wanted my body cleared of drugs so he couldn't give me anything to sedate me, but he didn't want me fed – keeping my blood-sugar levels down was another way of ensuring I couldn't use my powers. Clever. Very clever.

After that, he told me he'd invented something. A new 'device', he said, something that would test me to my limits. It looked like a big black cable, as thick through the middle as my fist. It had black metal points on the end – clawlike things. At least, I think they were made of metal – they had the strength and weight of steel, but they were warm to the touch, like plastic. I only figured out later that it was because it had a shielded electric current running through it.

It moved independently, almost as if it were intelligent; slow, intent movements. But it did what Harker wanted, though I never found out how he controlled it. It leaned forward and settled on my side – right here. Feel the hollow, the missing flesh?

At first I didn't know what it was doing. It kinda settled there, gently. I didn't look down. By that point I was so apathetic to more pain that I couldn't be bothered.

Then it _bit_. Hard. The sharp points sank below the skin and burrowed deeper and deeper until they were all the way in, but at an angle. 'Hurt' doesn't even describe it. It was like nothing I'd ever felt before, not even after spending seven months with Harker and his goons. The pain was inside me and outside of me all at the same time. My insides felt like they were burning and had set fire to my nervous system. My brain felt like an animal in a trap, panic everywhere. All I could see was white and light grey. My body was doing things and I wasn't sure what because I was so far away from everything. My body was reacting in the only way it knew how to, without me to control it.

It took me a while to realise I was screaming.

My body was straining tight against my restraints and they were probably biting into my wrists but I couldn't feel that. As soon as I had enough self-possession to realise all this, I tensed the other way – pushed myself into the table I was on and clenched my hands hard, trying to control the pain. I stopped the screaming but I still couldn't see properly, just flashes of white and grey and black. I could feel my heart beating too fast and the way I was breathing in and out, harsh, like I was chain-stoking – that thing that dying people do, deep and rapid breathing that can suddenly stop for a minute before starting again. I felt like that. If I forgot to concentrate on breathing in those big, heavy gasps that I'd stop breathing completely. It was a tempting thought. I thought that I might have been dying, but I thought that dying people weren't supposed to feel pain and it still felt like someone had chucked a handful of napalm onto my side. I think that last thing was what tipped the balance, because up to that point I'd been exhausted and cynical. But never broken. I'd never felt broken. It was the worst feeling, psychologically and physically, that I'd ever experienced.

Harker had battered my body to its stopping point. Officially. That was it, that was my limit, and my mind... I think it just jumped the rails. No more rational thought, or linear cogitation. It all vanished into the pain in my side, like matter into a black hole. The pain dwarfed it all, drove me over the lip and into the blood. I think I went insane. No fancy exaggerations this time; staying coherent and sane would have meant having to deal with everything, and the only thing in my world then was the pain.

Then there was a wet sound and the pain _exploded_. My vision went from white to grey to black and the last thing I remember feeling, aside from that agony, was Harker's hand on my forehead.

That didn't help my crumbling grip on reality any. I think it had hastened my decline, in fact. I could have coped better it it had been more cut-and-chase, black-and-white, but he was just so... kind. Everything about him expressed nothing but kindly concern, like I was a kid who wouldn't take her medicine, medicine that would make me all better. He smiled, and expressed consideration, treated me like a loved daughter in the way he spoke and acted. And he touched casually, reassuringly, all the time. I guess it was just part of his nice nature.

He made me look to him, even during the pain. Stockholm syndrome, you might call it, but I think it was more than that. Somehow, just through those casual touches, he made me believe that he didn't really mean it, that he wouldn't do such a thing. This made it a fresh betrayal every time he did, though I never let it show. In all the hurt, he only ever looked at me with kindness, and I came to crave that even if it meant more pain.

I could have coped better if he hadn't made me trust him."

The girl, Thirty-four or whatever her name actually was, had talked for the last twenty-five minutes. There had been some long pauses – one had lasted ten minutes – and she had simply lay on his chest, face tipped skywards, eyes closed, and totally expressionless. The Boss hadn't even tried to guess what she was thinking. He hadn't pushed her for details, hadn't said anything, because this was a fragile web he'd woven for her and he wasn't about to break it. One interruption and he knew she'd be finished.

He processed what she had told him thus far, all in a flat and parched voice. That last bit, in particular, fascinated him and he turned it over and over in his mind. It explained all of the behaviour he'd seen of her in the last forty-eight hours, and most before that. It was Harker and his casual kindness that had finally snapped her in twain, although that brutal tube-thing had tipped her over the edge. Harker's penchant for thoughtless niceties were a total contradiction to what he had done to her – classic schizophrenogenic behaviour. It was no surprise that she'd finally lost it, and lost it she had. He had the reports on her last few weeks with Harker buried in her file, and her drastic shift in behaviour betrayed her drastic change in mental state.

She must have overcome that, somehow. She must also have fought past the associations he'd engraved in her mind – of Harker as a caring, concerned figure despite his inherent cruelty. But she hadn't beaten all of them, no, she hadn't. Her reaction to _him_ had shown as much. With Harker she'd started to associate the kindness with the pain, and that carried on even after she escaped. She'd forgotten how to feel protected without expecting to hurt for it, and as a result had spent the next few years shying away from physical contact. And so, when he himself had touched her without malice and with kindness, she'd simply buckled. She missed the contact for so long that her physical walls had crumbled and, when he hadn't punished her for it, she'd allowed him to reach out to her. Psychology 101: interrogating the abused. Or physics 101, perhaps: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. There was Harker, who formed this girl. Action, reaction. And that reaction had bounced back and slaughtered its origins. Hopefully, soon she would tell him all about that.

He didn't allow himself to feel impatient. Instead, he simply leaned back against the rise of the bed under his back and idly focused down on the slim girl atop him. She was a strange creature and the Boss saw everything he needed to see about her as a person in her collarbones: they were a convoluted line through her shoulders, a thin snarl across her chest. She was a chiaroscuro and they highlighted everything about her – sharp and shadowed, bony, angular, as if her flesh and her skeleton were at odds and refused to share the same space.

Her eyes weren't closed; he could see the lashes move as she blinked occasionally. She was perfectly aware he was there – not lost in her thoughts or buried deep in recollections, but carefully controlling herself, repressing all relevant emotion.

He _really_ needed to get her to stop doing that. Well, time enough...

Her eyes flickered shut, just for a moment, and her shoulderblades dug into his stomach as she breathed in. Then she opened her eyes and continued to speak.

"I don't remember... much... from the weeks after that. I'm fairly sure I was there another few weeks, but it's all so fragmented, disjointed, in pieces... not so much repressed, but as though the mental equipment responsible for recording the progression of my life broke down. It wouldn't surprise me. But I remember... crying. Screaming, sometimes, but I can't remember much of that. But there was crying. I just wanted Harker near, all the time. They carried on with their 'experiments'. The pain... well, if I don't remember it, then there's probably a good reason.

He never used the black tube thing again. I think he knew I'd gone over the edge, and one more jaunt like that would have been enough to kill me, despite my super abilities giving me a higher tolerance to shock. Everything in me, emotionally and psychologically, was... well have you ever seen footage of a building being demolished? The way it stands there, and then sort of collapses downwards with a speed that seems both fast and slow at the same time? My mind did something very similar. And I would have fallen all the way down, begging and crying for death all the way, if he hadn't made a crucial mistake two or three weeks later."

She paused again and he kept his eyes trained on her, carefully stroking his thumb over the curve of her shoulder, his touch riding the ridge of her collarbone and back again. Her skin was still cold, but warming fast.

"In all that time, I find it hard to believe that his kindness was unintentional, that he didn't realise the impact it had on me. Either that, or he was just classically stupid. Or thought himself invincible. Or something. I try not to dwell on it. In all that time he'd kept me starved and bound, mentally and physically, so that I couldn't use my powers. It worked extremely well. I just can't believe the mistake he made.

Two weeks later, might have been three, he's there. I can't remember where I was or what I was doing... not even my surroundings. I could have been on the Eiffel Tower, my memory is that fragmented. But I remember him saying something, clear as day. It was a communication message. _'All is going according to plan, we're getting more data from thirty-four than we ever believed possible. We'll continue until the subject is no longer of any use.'_ Then... he turned to me, I think, kindly as ever. Then he raised my chin so I was looking at him properly and smiled. And he said, _'Well, thirty-four, this is the end of the road for you. You've been good, even if it took me a while to make you co-operate. Still... your data is invaluable. Right, guards, start looking for another test subject...'_

Some part of me froze solid in that instant. It was like the marrow in my bones had solidified, all in that one moment, a weird mixture of thoughtless terror and anger. The guards started to drag me away, like I'd been dismissed, and that made the anger grow. It evolved into rage that clouded my vision.

I know it sounds stupid... it certainly doesn't make sense. I'd tipped over the edge because I'd been near-killed by this man that I trusted, implicitly. And I came back because he dismissed me like any other. Well, you know what they say, 'Hell hath no fury...'

I don't remember much of what happened next. It's a fair bet that I rediscovered the use of my powers, rage-inspired energy perhaps, because what I found when the fog cleared wouldn't have been possible without them. I have vague recollections of people screaming, of flames from destroyed computer banks, of my hands hurting. And when it all cleared I was kneeling over Harker's dead body and the corpses of a fair few guards. The lights were gone, the place was burning and utterly deserted. Every old wound that was still reasonably fresh had reopened and I was losing a lot of blood, especially from my side. I took my first proper look at that wound then and there. I don't think I would have gotten out alive if I hadn't. Yes, this wound here. The deep, pitted one. There was a chunk of muscle missing, and there was blood everywhere. The pain was... it was bad.

I was in the main room of the laboratory, with a rough mental map of a way out to the surface, but I was starved and drained, and I was losing blood fast. It took me a moment to realise I was crying as well, and another to realise there was blood mingling with the tears. Whatever had happened had given me this scar on my face.

I was on my feet, but barely – whatever adrenaline-fuelled rage that had possessed me before had come, gone and presented its bill. I had nothing left. But you'd be surprised what the definition of 'nothing' is for a super. I guess I was just so determined to get out alive, even after the last eight months. That _bastard_ had made me care about him. He'd made me trust him, hell, probably love him like a father. He pushed me for so long and for so hard, and finally he pushed too far – he didn't validate the trust that I had placed in him. I sounds so stupid, that torture didn't make me angry enough to get out, but I guess the human touch means more than people think it does.

I headed upwards, stumbling over every step. I knew the way. It was the same one I'd used to get into that mess, engraved on my brain forever. And it wasn't far. Three corridors. All the doors opened by the emergency fire system. When I got to the surface I stepped out into a scene I will never forget for the rest of my life.

When I had gone in, it had been winter, and that had been my last memory of the world outside. When I emerged, it was shining, and the temperatures were high. I was in the courtyard to what looked like a warehouse, but in fact housed the entrance to the lab. My world under Harker's regime had consisted of greys, whites and reds. I'd forgotten what the sky looked like, or sandy concrete, or trees.

The fact that there was smoke pouring out of the exit to the 'warehouse' had meant that it had attracted quite a crowd, and so I was noticed pretty much immediately. I was thin, swaying, and soaked through with blood. I blacked out a bit from there, though I do remember being lowered to the floor and someone crying for an ambulance.

The next thing I knew was a hospital room, countless stitches, a skin graft for my side and a morphine drip. I blacked out again. When I woke up after that, I had no idea how long I'd slept, only that I felt better than I had in... well, months. A nurse told me I'd been in and out of consciousness for two weeks, mostly waking just to cry. Some of my stitches had been taken out, and the skin graft had taken hold almost supernaturally fast, though I was told to avoid straining myself for another four weeks at least.

I felt myself greying out, and the last thing I heard before fading out again was that the admin staff had some questions for me when I woke up.

Maybe it was just as well that the next time I woke it was in the early hours of the morning. Every part of me hurt, especially my side, but I was thinking clearly for the first time in eight months. I knew what I had to do.

I escaped the hospital, stealing some clothes from a locker room. I just walked out of the place.

The hospital was within three blocks of the warehouse, so I knew roughly where I was, and how far it was back to the NSA. I nearly had a hysterical crying session right there despite that, and that was the first time I taught myself to control my emotions so that I could deal with the current situation.

So I engaged in a little grand theft auto. Used my powers, broke the lock on a car, hotwired it using some tips I'd picked up in the crimefighting business, and just drove it away. I was about a state away from the NSA headquarters and I knew I'd be driving for a few hours to get back. But I did it. Ditching the car ten minutes from the NSA building and walking the rest of the way meant I ripped out a few stitches and I had to use my stolen socks to stop the bleeding, but I still managed to waltz back into the NSA headquarters, report to a stunned-looking Rick Dicker and hit one of the supers' dorms before crashing out.

I think they tried to follow me but I'd locked the dorm room from the inside. I just let myself sleep for the first time in months. They tried to make me answer questions when I re-emerged fifteen hours later, but I didn't respond to any of them. I went straight to see Dicker, who had some pretty prying questions of his own. I just told him that the mission had gone according to plan, but I'd hit a complication. He asked me what could warrant an eight-month complication, amongst other questions. I didn't answer any of them. He tried to make me check into a hospital for psychiatric and physical evaluations, but I told him that if I went into hospital then I would never come back to the NSA, and my talents are rare enough for him to have weighed it out and decide in my favour.

I sorted out the broken stitches myself, cleaned away all the blood, and had the resident designer make me a new suit. I took it easy for a few weeks before throwing myself into training. To be honest, I'm not sure the Agency wanted me back so soon, if at all.

None of them saw my scars, aside for the one on my face.

Four years later, and here I am."

She fell silent again, and the Boss suspected it was for the last time. She'd spoken her piece with the clear clinical clarity of a narrator, talking as if she had been relating the tale of someone else, someone who she didn't particularly care for. He found himself feeling slightly irked; he'd found the information he needed but it hadn't had its intended effect – there'd been no emotional trauma that she'd made him aware of. She'd simply recounted her tale.

Ah, well. At least he knew where the wound was. Tomorrow, he would start poking it.

He felt her relax into him, perhaps lulled by the dim lighting in the room and sheer exhaustion. Her head lay tipped back on his chest, hands resting on the arms he'd wrapped around her ribs – a close, circular embrace. There was something peaceful in the silence and gentle in the touch, an irony that didn't miss him, a perfect balance that didn't need speech. She was so fragile – despite the strength he intellectually knew she possessed, he couldn't shake the notion that if he squeezed she'd splinter into pieces.

He pulled her further up his body slightly, allowing her head to rest on the curve of his shoulder. She didn't even open her eyes. It seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to lean up and over, around the side of her head, and touch his lips to hers.

He wasn't entirely sure why he did it – it just fit with the ambience of the room, with the image he tried to project. It was a comfort thing for her, nothing more. And it wasn't like he hadn't done it before – in her cell, her respiration had been so low as to warrant a little mouth-to-mouth. Whatever the reason, he didn't sense a jump in her heartbeat or her breathing in the skin under his arms. She wasn't shocked or surprised, but she did tilt her head back further in an expression of unspoken consent. It occurred to him then that she had placed some trust in him, and he smiled. She had a bad habit of doing that.

Perhaps she was aware of that, and didn't care.

They stayed like that a little while, almost like a cautious exploration of each other. It was a comfortable place in time, wrung out of all exciting emotions, a space in the air warmed by ground-down solace. It was a gentle shifting, the faintest suggestion of movement, light and unregarded, with a certain intimacy that defied expectation; a way to share the moment, a warm giving-taking on both sides, a base physical expression of the moment and the things they had talked of. It's finished today, it seemed to say. This is our conclusion.

Eventually, he drew his head back just enough so that their lips still touched, and whispered, "Sleep now." She didn't reply, but he hadn't expected her to. She'd talked a long while, and although she hadn't displayed much visible emotion, he was betting that the memories she'd stirred up were painful and tiring. Of course, she had yet to recover from her freezing jaunt as well.

He watched her carefully for fifteen minutes, and he could pinpoint the moment when she dropped away: the desperate hands on his arms slackened and her head relaxed slightly to one side. He moved carefully, raising her head from his chest with one hand and slipping sideways. Supporting her frame, he slid her onto the surface of the padded table and moved away. She didn't wake.

Right, then. Stage one was sorted; time to prepare for stage two...

* * *

_To be continued._

* * *

**Story References**  
_schizophrenogenic (psychological term)_: behaviour that causes schizophrenia in those exposed to said behaviour, usually characteristic of family involvements, e.g. the schizophrenic mother whose extreme mixed-message behaviour causes their child to develop schizophrenia.

"Heav'n hath no rage like love to hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn'd." —William Congreve


	8. viii

Sometimes people just go crazy from too much abuse and violence and take drastic, irrational measures to protect themselves._  
- Michael Moore, 'Stupid White Men'_

* * *

Violet awoke all in a moment, a single leap from sleep to wakefulness. And with that leap came the knowledge that had been biding its time in her brain – where she was, and how she had gotten there.

Her thinking was clear for the first time since the incident in the hangar, and she gingerly touched her head. The skin was still sore, but her minor concussion must have finally healed up. She felt fully in control again. Sleep: the poor man's physician and Violet's own personal Lord and Saviour.

She sat up from the table, swinging her legs down. The rooms was as darkened as it had been before. She had been covered with a light-grey soft-wool blanket she had a vague recollection of, and it slipped to the floor as she looked around. The room was bare, save the table she'd been lying on (something eerily reminiscent of a hospital bed) and a small table next to that. The lights were behind clear panels in the ceilings, set to a low glow. There was a door in the wall to her left, and another in the wall opposite, and she was betting they were locked.

How strong did she feel? She tightened her hand into a fist and squeezed. Hmm, some strength there – more than there was yesterday, at any rate. Her powers were still operative and secreted away, and now she was seriously beginning to consider escape she had a moment's feeling of grim thankfulness that she'd had presence of mind to keep them hidden.

Violet looked down at the table and picked up her top from where she'd been using it as a pillow. Pulling it on, she made a mental note of its rips and the blood still tacked onto the material. Still, it was better than nothing.

She took a moment to close her eyes and recall what had happened to get her here, warm and well-rested, in the first place. She felt disgruntled and sorely amused at the tactics Syndrome had used to get her to talk. So old-fashioned, and so clever; the man had made a study of human nature, helped along by his little trained scientists, and had figured out a much more subtle way to push buttons than Harker ever had. Where Harker's psychological attacks had been unconscious, Syndrome's were deliberate. The two were opposite sides of the coin in their attitudes to prisoners and were as devastatingly effective as each other.

And what had she gained? A brief stay of execution, she assumed, a reward not tempting enough to quell the self-directed anger she felt. Why had she been so _stupid_ as to tell Syndrome what he wanted to know? True, the concussion had probably played a major part in that, but she thought her control was stronger. She'd traded her knowledge for a moment of mindless comfort, allowed herself to be controlled again by a tormentor.

_I should have known _better.

And for all the talking she'd done there was no feeling of catharsis or healing, and nor had she expected any. She'd told Syndrome what he needed to know, had escaped her frozen prison, and received a few minutes' warmth and attention (something she'd needed more than she'd allowed herself to realise). Now, fulfilling the cycle, he would discard her and she would try to think of what to do next. Escape, something she kept her mind trained on, was her only option.

_But something you're not likely to manage in a hurry,_ her stomach told her. She hadn't been fed in a while and the strength she knew she still possessed would be nothing without food to fuel it.

The door to her left opened suddenly and without warning. Violet's eyes shot towards it and her hands tightened on the edge of the table, automatically assuming an aggressive stance despite her thin supplies of energy.

She needn't have bothered. A man in a long lab coat came through, tall and awkwardly bespectacled, and the door sealed itself behind the guard that followed. He was easily six feet tall and thin as a rail, thinned hair of a nondescript colour and wide, round glasses. He carried a white mug that steamed gently and was looking over a chart with a focus that Violet marked immediately as false. Quite sensibly, the guard with him raised his rifle to point at Violet, an intelligent safety precaution Violet mentally commended Syndrome for.

The mug was thrust towards her by the white-coated man and she looked at it before looking at him again, face set.

"Take it," the man said shortly, darting a glance up toward her. Violet gave it a moment before reaching out and grasping the mug in hands that, while tired, did not tremble. She watched with interest as the man kept his gaze fixed on his hand as if scared she might remove it by the wrist, and as soon as the mug was safely out of his jurisdiction he took several hurried steps back. _He's frightened of me,_ thought Violet with a kind of grim satisfaction. He was nervous and jumpy, and never made eye contact.

Violet looked into the mug. The substance inside was thick and gloopy, a viscous yellowy-brown. She glanced up again.

"Soup," the man said is answer to the unspoken question. "It's all you'll be able to eat for a while. There's nothing else in it," he added hastily. "No tranquillisers or anything. The Boss just said he wants you fed."

The man's accent was Northeastern American. A man, Violet thought, a long way from home, and my, didn't he know it. Without taking her eyes from his diverted ones, she drained the mug.

"Whatever the Boss wants," she said prosaically, but with a wicked twist of sarcasm.

The man, presumably a doctor, spared her a agitated glance and beat a tense retreat. The guard followed him out of the door that opened for him, never once removing the rifle's aim from her body. The door shut once more and Violet was left on her own.

She glanced down at the mug in her hand, a sore bemusement noting that the man had been too high-strung to take it back from her. It was empty now and she felt the stuff in her stomach sending out fat tendrils of energy to her limbs. Already she felt more energised and more awake. Violet hadn't trusted the man's declaration that there hadn't been anything drug-related in the concoction, but she felt no ill effects aside from the lingering remnants of her fatigue. Her nerves and muscles seemed to be operating fairly well, a fact she proved by tensing her body once more when the door opened again and Syndrome stepped through.

The lights in the room had brightened somewhat, she noticed, bringing it back to a more daylight setting from the dusky atmosphere achieved earlier. The bright halogen bulbs threw highlights into Syndrome's hair, grey mixed in with the auburn, and she prepared herself for whatever cruelty he had in store.

Today he wore a pale blue shirt that went well with his eyes, his taste in shirts still with an inexplicable sense of style – something she would never have attributed to him. He leaned against the wall opposite her with an easy dignity, arms folded over his stomach, eyes tracking her every movement with a predator's grace. There was half a smile on his mouth, and Violet once again kicked herself for revealing so much to him. He knew nothing that he could really use against her, and she knew she'd delivered her story with a minimum of expression – her emotional barriers were still good. What could he tell her that she didn't already know? The only piece of information that could conceivably get her killed was still tucked away in her mind, and he showed no signs of recognition – not as Violet Parr, or as the naïve little Invisigirl she had once been. Still, he was a man whose operations controlled a good segment of the financial world. If he thought he recognised her from somewhere, he would never show it to her for fear it was a weakness that could be exploited. And if he knew who she was, it was a fair bet she'd be dead by now. Violet was still confident that her identity remained hidden, thanks in part to the absence of her supers' mask; that little aside she'd discussed with Dicker had paid dividends.

Violet sat still and steady on the table (considering the physical closeness she had shared with Syndrome only hours before, she refused to think of it as a bed), watching him warily, her throat-length hair on either side of her vision. She wouldn't make the first move – this was his turf and he had control. Her best bet was to play it defensive, lull him into the security of predicting her every move in that vein, then use an aggressive assault to fight her way out. She knew that there were hangars dotted about and she could easily bust through using a combination of shielding and invisibility. A hidden identity meant hidden powers, and that would be her chance for escape. Despite her capture and subsequent lapse, Violet knew she had enough self-possession and firepower to break out. The only thing now was to look for her moment that would not alert the higher-ups too quickly as to the nature of her abilities.

The only problem was stamina; she was still hungry, despite whatever protein-rich gloop she'd been given. The man had been right: the only thing she could hold in her abused stomach for the next couple of days would be simple, bland food. This meant that her energy supplies, whilst galvanised, were still low.

Still, she reminded herself, she'd broken free from Harker with no energy whatsoever and whilst losing pints of her own blood. This should be a walk in the park by comparison.

"You may be wondering what I'm doing here," said Syndrome suddenly, breaking her plans.

"It had crossed my mind," replied Violet calmly, never removing her eyes from him, determined to retain her defensive edge. Her mind raced, flashing over the multiple meanings of Syndrome's statement – and in this she was proud. She still had an edge in her thinking and her cogitation was clear – her mind was a flickering creature whose strength remained steady.

Syndrome sighed, expression twisting into one of mild arrogance. He straightened up from the wall, arms still folded, and said, "So. Let's talk about Harker, shall we?"

Violet was thrown for a moment. They'd already gone over this. What was to be gained for him by discussing it further?

She straightened up, hair falling away from her face, throat proudly exposed in a challenge of authority. _I can defend myself, _her body language screamed.

"If you insist," she retorted smoothly, and was pleased to see a moment's irritation flash over his broad features. Violet had to fight back an inexplicable urge to burst out laughing. It was not very hard to play Syndrome's game better than himself; he thought he knew her, and he thought he knew how to play her emotions, banking particularly on her supposed 'fear' of Harker. She would quite contentedly disprove his happy little theory.

Syndrome settled himself against the wall again, seemingly aware that this would not be as easy as he had planned, regardless of what those plans were. She could almost see it when he switched tack and changed his approach.

He indicated the door with one hand, the other now tucked into a pocket. Violet glanced from the door and back to Syndrome sharply, frowning a little, unsure. What exactly was Mr. McMegalomaniac planning? And why did it involve her? Whatever the answers, they could not have been good; she was an intruder, and intruder with a past (two pasts, actually) directly linked to him, and neither were pleasant. Her only protection was her identity – or lack thereof – and she didn't know if he'd figured it out yet.

And yet... the spontaneity that was evident when he'd gestured to the door indicated that this was no planned venture, no execution. Nevertheless, Violet held her ground, acutely aware that in this hostile situation her best option was to remain on the defensive. She sat on the table, eyes boring into Syndrome's, forcing him to make the first move.

To her surprise, he did so. He strode over to the door in a few easy steps and it slid open, revealing a couple of guards on either side of the entrance. Syndrome murmured something to one of them, and there was a responsive nod. He turned to face her again and extended his hand, a wordless come-and-see gesture that promised unknown things. Violet didn't break her gaze from his eyes. She stood and walked toward him in careful, measured steps, and finally stopped right in front of him.

There was a moment's pure silence that was shot through with the energy fallout from their battle of wills. They did not break gaze or move, but stood in silent challenge for almost a full minute.

Finally, a smile turned up Violet's mouth in a way that absolutely did not run to her eyes. Reaching up, she pushed the forgotten mug into Syndrome's chest, not removing the pressure until his own hand came up to grasp it. She took her hand away and walked out of the door while murmuring over her shoulder, "Yours, I think."

--I--

He stood frozen for a moment in an instant of thankless surprise until a pointed look from one of the guards thawed him. There was absolutely no predicting this girl. He thought he had her cornered and weak, defenceless, and without even a pause to adjust to her new surroundings she'd reverted back to up DEFCON 2 and one step below all-out nuclear defence. Thirty-four had thrown up her shields faster than he gave her credit for, and he cursed under his breath. He'd underestimated her _again_. So what _else_ was he miscalculating of her?

He realised he was staring at her back in parts angry incredulity and surprise, and pulled himself together. He thrust the mug she'd had the temerity to push at him to an unsuspecting guard, who scrambled with it, juggled rifle and cup, and finally succeeding in not dropping either or accidentally shooting someone.

"Get rid of that," he told the guard curtly. "And get another unit up here." Two units wouldn't be enough, not with her powers still unknown, and with her capacity to still surprise him he didn't want to take any more chances. She was weak but she had proven herself to be tough, and the Boss found himself feeling annoyed at her resilience. That was _not_ how things were meant to work.

The corridors were empty of people save the guards he'd assigned here, and that was how he'd planned it. It was night-time in the base, and all of his workers were in the huge area of the base set aside for living quarters. It comprised of flats for each worker or family, restaurants, bowling alleys, two cinemas and a few goods and food shops. The Boss believed in keeping his workers happy, and it had paid surprising dividends – there was a feeling of fierce loyalty to him throughout the base, guard and worker alike. He paid well and he kept them comfortable, and because of it a few of the workers had approached him to tell him that they could finally afford to put their kids through college despite their relocation.

He'd also paid for an extensive training program for the guards. That, however, didn't seem to have worked out as planned. It evidently hadn't been sufficient to train a few of the lower-level sentinels as to the intricacies and delicacies of subterfuge and infiltration, the proof of such a miscalculation now standing self-importantly a few feet away from him.

Who, incidentally, was taking this all a little too well. The girl's body clock was no doubt thrown completely out of whack and she couldn't know it was the early hours of the morning, the one time when his base _wasn't_ thronged with people. Evidently, she had noticed this, as she turned to him and pinned him with that oversharp, infuriatingly-familiar purple stare.

"There are no people here."

"Well now, I'm sure the guards would take offence at that."

She didn't say anything more and didn't break her gaze, although the level of cold contempt upped a notch. The Boss, unbelievably, felt himself getting defensive. He was just beginning to see who she really was when she wasn't aching, tortured or trying to stay conscious, and thought that once again he'd underestimated her. She had turned prickly defensiveness into an aggressive assault all its own; an art form, perhaps. Her time with Harker must have forged her into this, this double-bladed and double-edged weapon, calculating and nihilistically destructive.

Instead, he ignored her silent question and indicated down the hallway to her left. It was a long corridor in the same colour scheme as the rest of the base and had a white automatic door at the end. The eight guards around them adjusted their aims and grips on their rifles – cautiously aggressive, extremely wary – as another four guards rounded the corner, equally as battle-ready. The girl, Thirty-four or whatever, took the hint, and started walking down the corridor. It was an odd sight, he reflected, as he followed just behind her and to her left. She was small and slight, painfully thin, probably no taller than five feet seven, and yet the heavy guards around her treated her like a defective bomb that may or may not go off.

Which was probably true, he thought wryly. She was so full of mysteries that a little extra caution was merited. And what he was about to do now would indeed be like trying to defuse a bomb; only, instead of safety, he wanted the explosion. More guards were probably a _very_ wise decision.

So they walked, this odd little company of people, seemingly led by a broken survivor with her head held high. They walked through three corridors, all on the same level, and at each door a guard would use his keycard to let them through.

Finally, they reached a corridor that he knew would be familiar territory for the girl, and motioned the guards to fall back a little. He stood back himself for a moment, and waited for her to react.

--I--

What the _hell_ was Syndrome playing at?

After that small amount of wandering they'd ended up in a square room she found nostalgically familiar. There were desks and computers, a door straight ahead of her, a grey-lined passageway to her right and very large entrance to her left.

To the HQ room.

She'd walked through this crossroads room a few times, either being led away for 'interrogation' or being returned to the cells that stretched away in a row to her right, but she'd never seen it this empty.

So Violet stepped forward into the oddly-deserted space, looking left and into that cavernous space which housed that mother of all computer screens. She felt the space behind her fill up as Syndrome moved forward and around her, standing at the lip of the stairs that led into that massive room. He indicated down the steps with one hand and offered his other. Violet ignored him completely and descended the stairs effortlessly and without any sign of pain, although her legs were aching badly. She'd recovered less than she'd thought.

The room was extremely well-lit, and pleasantly warm. The ceiling hung above her head like some kind of bizarre sky; she could see the ventilation gap she'd peered through, a long road of black shadow high up on the pale grey ceiling. The walls were a light blue, a good contrast to the warm tones of the polished wooden desks and their deep blue chairs. She walked down the stairs in silence, feeling Syndrome fall into step behind her, and was mildly grateful he didn't try to touch her.

The carpet of the room beneath her feet was soft and plushy, the same blue as the chairs, and she wondered for a moment what it would feel like against her bare soles. Still, there was a time and a place, and this was not it.

Violet reached the bottom of the stairs and continued forward, eyes fixed on the gigantic screen ahead. It was a blank beige colour at the moment, and anyone else would perhaps have mistaken it for an ordinary wall. Violet walked the distance between the regimented ranks of desks and the screen drew nearer, until she paused, halfway there.

This was... odd. Guided tours of the innermost sanctum were not usually high up on the list of a villain's daily to-do list and she turned, brow dipped in a faint frown, to level a questioning stare at him.

Behind him, around and to the back of the stairs she had descended, were more desks and computers with several large screens (perhaps six feet long by three) hanging from the walls. They were ordinary screens, nothing compared to the masterpiece of cinematography behind her, but they showed that there was some other way of processing information in the base. She stored the knowledge away for future reference. She also noted that their guard entourage had stopped at the top of the stairs; she and Syndrome were alone in the room, despite the guards' visibility and their drawn weapons.

Syndrome himself was watching her from his height advantage, a mild smile across his unassuming features. He gestured forwards once more and she turned her back and continued to walk with him keeping pace behind her.

Violet looked forward, puzzled again. In the space left by that giant semicircle of a desk, the one that was closest to the giant screen, was a small blue dot on the carpet. It looked to be about as wide through as the length of her arm, and was highly visible against the dark blue of the carpet. She approached it with equal parts caution and curiosity, and then Syndrome said the first words since they'd started this little journey.

"Step onto it," he said quietly. She didn't even bother wondering about what would happen if she didn't.

One stride took her to the centre of the circle and instantly, the wall in front of her flashed to life: that same hubbub of information, charts, documents miniaturised, pictures, information. None of it was dancing around as before, though – it was all stationary, but still alive; the video clips were moving, the charts were shifting slightly in favour of one direction or another.

"We keep American Eastern Standard time here in order to keep in sync with Wall Street and the stock market," Syndrome said mildly behind her, touched with just a hint of pride. Violet mentally attributed this to why there were no people about; if the stock market was closed for the day then there was no need for anyone to be at the hub of the base's financial activity.

Violet switched her brain into a higher gear, and shifted the information around in her head. She blocked out the thoughts of the man behind her, the base behind that, and Zharov, no doubt flying a hundred miles away. The screen in front of her was not simply stationary, as she had first assumed; she could now see the links between the information and understood it to be frozen mid-pattern. She changed gear and tilted her head to one side, now utterly unmindful of her surroundings. This was a puzzle, a challenge, and she had become good at those of late.

She raised her arms into the air and pointed at certain pieces of information on the screen in order to keep track of them. She was utterly unsurprised that, when she moved her hands, the information on the screen indeed moved to follow her gesture.

Ah. So _that_ was how Syndrome had done it.

It didn't take her long to get the knack of the interactive screen and before long was sifting information, socking it in different corners of the screen, shrinking it with a push of her hand and maximising it with a pull. She found should could put different bits of information on each finger and this made the dance quicker and more efficient.

She was looking for Syndrome in all that mess; what he was doing, where he was influential, what the whole base amounted to. It was the one puzzle of the man she had yet to solve, although she knew it had something to do with financial control.

The picture she began to build slowly and inexorably from the information she shifted was both startling and frightening. Almost without registering it she took the databanks online and started using more current information filtered through the system, keeping tabs on the shifts in Syndrome's financial sectors.

She had been right – his interests were primarily scientific and technological, a wide base of studies, research and investments panning out over his financial spectrum. He also had shares in non-technology-related companies, but a glance at their statistics showed how this was more for financial gain than any personal interest. Syndrome had played the market and played it well – he was now the primary investor (and, presumably, strongest controlling influence) in every sector of the world's defence companies except – and she looked quite hard – any supers' alliances. The NSA, the Russian PCBK, any other international groups... none of it was here. Whether this was because the companies weren't open to private investors due to their necessary secret natures or because Syndrome couldn't bring himself to invest in them Violet didn't know, but he sure had his fingers everywhere else. There was a large section entirely set aside for Supers' research, mostly unused. Her file was linked to it and she didn't bother exploring it. She knew it all.

So she pressed on and dug deeper, dredging up Syndrome's paper trail through the world's economy using the man's own databanks. He'd constructed a secret, underground corporation using a few scant millions from offshore accounts and twisted the numbers so well they'd slipped into the global markets with nary a ripple of attention. Regardless of the people he'd hired to help him maintain this level of influence, he'd played the markets with a bizarre brilliance that showed his genius extended to more than his own personal inventions.

But_ why?_ Why had he done all of this?

She lowered her arms at last, feeling weighted and puzzled. This man controlled so much of the world, and without the world even knowing it. Why? Why the emphasis on technology and research? Why Harker? Why anything?

She turned to him, unafraid, and frowned at him in confusion.

"There's so much here. So much money, so much power... why?"

The strong yet warm lighting of the room flattered him here in this open space. There wasn't a hint of malice in his features when he smiled gently at her, arms crossed over his torso in easy amusement.

"It's... complicated."

Violet turned back to the screen for a moment and pulled forward the three biggest investments of Syndrome's. Two were world-famous defence corporations, and the third was her own case. The icon for her file was a picture of a simple beige file with the word 'Harker' written on it. In large, heavy red letters underneath that was the word 'INCOMPLETE'.

"Why supers?" she asked again, puzzled. "You have so much in the heavy-duty defence companies, dominant world powers that control whole corporations and even countries. And then there's me. You rate research into supers right up there with international corporations. That tells me there's something personal there." She didn't need the screen to tell her that, though. He'd been kidnapping and killing supers years before she'd met him. What she didn't get, though, was why he still thought it necessary, despite his resources and the money at his disposal. "And yet, there's _only_ me."

"Well, kidnapping a super takes a lot of time and energy," Syndrome said, eyes affixed to hers. _Yep, know all about that, Syndrome._ "And a lot of funding. Bases to be built, money to keep the architects quiet, resources bought, and so on. I guess I'm just fascinated with you lot."

Violet studied him for a moment. That easygoing air never left him, and because of it she could practically see the lie pouring from every line in his face. "That still doesn't explain why you invested so much in it," she persisted flatly. "It's more than a hobby for you. The amount you put into it..." She pulled up several charts from the file. "This shows that there's something really _personal_ going on here."

"All of that, and I _still_ don't know what your powers are," Syndrome responded with a smile. Violet noted his deft change of conversation, and let herself be carried by it. She turned her back to him again to face the screen, and said in a flat voice tinged with sarcasm, "It's... complicated."

He surprised her by issuing a short burst of laughter, and then she felt him draw closer to her. She stood staring at the screen, not making any move to shift its contents. Because of the room's vast size, she felt his proximity more strongly than she might have otherwise, and was not surprised when he reached around her. He grabbed her file, making a fist in the empty air that registered with the screen, and brought it to the fore.

Violet said nothing, not even when he opened the file so that its information, documents, clips, photos and all, were displayed on a screen in excruciating detail eight stories high. She did, however, feel her body retreating back into its defensive mode from her previous scholarly outburst. Whatever the point of this was, it couldn't be good.

She was just relieved he wasn't trying to touch her.

To Violet's surprise, the piece of information he was looking for was a large, fine picture of Harker looking at his best, lab coat and all. The image on the screen was easily twenty feet tall, magnifying and amplifying all of Harker's features. Violet felt a jolt, low down in her gut; Harker's eyes were as kind as she remembered them to be, his smile as benign as memory served. He was an attractive man, she thought clinically, and not for the first time; the lines to his face were straight and uncomplicated, depth of jaw and cheekbone giving him a well-proportioned countenance.

To her horror, she felt a low pang of wistfulness in her chest. She fought it down with rising panic, telling herself repeatedly that she had worked hard to _not feel that any more_. But the treacherous feeling stayed there, low, like a dangerous undertow, and she was just _betting_ that Syndrome knew.

"Ah, Doctor Harker," said Syndrome's voice pleasantly into her ear. If he were stood any closer behind her he'd be touching her. "Where, I believe, this whole mess started."

Violet said nothing, a slow feeling of dread slipping up her insides. She didn't want this conversation to go where she thought it was going to.

"Yes, our dear Doctor Harker... except he wasn't that dear, was he? He threw you aside like a pet he didn't want anymore. Or, at least, he was going to. He never got the chance."

Something flashed across Violet's vision then, like a sharp black shadow whose depths contained images she'd rather not see. She pushed it away from herself and focused inwards, on bringing everything under control. Calm. Breathe. She was calm, she was a rock, she was steady. Rocks have no feelings, they are cold, they are stone. _I am stone._

"Shame, really," continued Syndrome in that low, seductive tone. "He never got a chance to say he didn't mean it. Still, it was worth it, right? Take away all the pain? All you had to give up was his care and love."

Violet felt words in the base of her throat that needed to be said. She bit them back fiercely, evading the curveball memories her own subconscious flung at her and trying to balance realities like some desperate juggling trick. She was in this huge room of blue; there were warm wooden desks and a huge screen in front of her, so fine she couldn't see the pixels. She was not trapped like a wounded bear cub and almost insensate with pain, her grip on sanity flowing away with the blood. The man standing behind her so closely she could feel his warmth was _not_ Harker. It was Syndrome, a clever and dangerous man, and she would do well to remember it. She would do well to remember _anything_. Anything real at all.

How had she become this weak? she wondered desperately, her grasp on her control slipping as though greased with blood. Her self-mastery had been fine a few days ago. She had withstood interrogation, kept her mind under leash at all times, same as normal. What had changed?

_She_ had, she realised with a sudden awful clarity, gaze fixed firmly upon the now long-dead eyes of Harker. That little confession she'd traded to Syndrome in exchange for warmth... it hadn't brought down her shields or healed her any, but it had weakened her resistance. This meant huge cracks in her defences, splintery wedges that went deep into the shell around her emotions.

What happens if you compress something? It gets hot and starts to boil, and that was a fair analogy of what her feelings were doing inside that protective bubble. All the anger, the hate, the pain and the terror had morphed into a kind of liquid poison under that pressure, kept away from the air and the light. And now it was trying to seep its way out of the cracks in her shields, eroding as it went.

Perhaps sensing weakness, albeit a weakness Violet was trying valiantly to keep under control, Syndrome pressed on.

"You killed him, didn't you, little Thirty-four? You hurt him and hurt him until he didn't get up any more and all the time you were glad. Then you walked away and left him, all on his own..."

"I didn't mean to kill him," she heard herself say mechanically. It was something she had needed to say, a self-explanatory compulsion, as though that would explain everything. It justified her down to the ground. Instantly, she recognised the lie behind it. Syndrome did, too.

"Oh, come now. Of course you did, little one. And you enjoyed it."

"No," she said automatically, fighting the memories trying to swamp her. They emerged out of a grey mist, things she couldn't remember doing or seeing, but she _must_ have, she _must_, because it was all in that period of time that she'd blanked out in, back during her bust-out. "_No._"

His hand was on her shoulder then, gently-gently. Violet turned like a wounded tiger, snarling and ready to strike. He'd expected this and played her reactions as skilfully as he had the stock market, and before she could lash out at him he'd clamped his own arms about her, pulled her in snugly so that her back followed the entire line of his torso, and forced her face to the screen. She struggled hard, twisting and turning, but he was taller by at least ten inches and was easily twice as broad as her. The muscles against her body squeezed in a relentless machine-like pressure, keeping her form still despite her attempts at freedom. This wasn't calculated struggle on her part; it was a combination of fear and desperate self-control.

She was aware of his grip on her and she tried to attack him, tried to turn to claw at him. But at the same time things were sailing out of the mist of her vision, regardless of her personal feelings on the matter: memories she didn't know she had, actions she couldn't remember making. Yes, she _had_ rediscovered the use of her powers that last day in Harker's base; she saw herself moving swiftly and throwing all before her into the walls with sickening cracks. _The people ran and shouted and tried to pepper her through with bullets but a well-crafted shield kept them at bay, the rage flowing through her a temporary substitute for real energy. It was like swapping a few gallons of bog-standard car gas for a cupful of jetfuel._

_She could see him running away, through a set of double doors and into the main lab. She followed at a steady run, the core of her very being set on his total destruction, her body now metabolising muscle to keep her going._

_She burst through the doors and into the large, circular, low-ceilinged hub of the base. Harker was frantically trying to punch something into a non-responsive server._

_She pictured a shield in the innards of the machine and twisted. Wiring deep inside the console broke free and sparked wildly, setting other electrical conduits ablaze. Harker stepped back from the machine with an alarmed cry, and finally turned to face her._

_There was unbridled terror in his gaze, and Violet gloried in it._

_There was a shard of glass on the floor by her feet and she picked it up, never taking her eyes from the gibbering doctor._

"_I didn't mean for all this," he was gabbling, trying to edge further back into the computer. "I didn't mean to hurt you, I, I didn't mean for... f-for any of this, I-I –"_

"_I know," she said softly, beautifully, and moved forward as all around her bullets bounced and people fled and the air was thick with smoke and the smell of electrical burning and_

"You hurt him and let him die," said Syndrome, his lips right by her ear.

"_I know!_" she screamed then and twisted free of his grip with a violent wrench, stumbling blindly a few steps until her thighs hit the side of a desk. She dropped to her knees then, clutching her head, trying to regain her mental balance through the thickening smoke and the sounds of people screaming. _They wouldn't shut up, she thought dimly, and felt a primal cry building up inside her body. She saw no reason to suppress it, let it loose, and then even the guards stopped shooting. They dropped gun and ran with the rest of them until finally it was just her and Harker._

_He lay, bleeding, clutching the glass shard embedded into his gut. "No," he gasped, leaking blood onto his spotlessly-white lab coat. "No."_

_Thirty-four felt a moment of profound sorrow at the loss of such a coat, and conjured a bubble around Harker's head in penance for his mess. He gasped and clawed wildly at the purple haze about his face as she retreated a for few seconds and picked up a gun. A few flicks of her hand ensured it was loaded and the safety was off._

_She dissolved the bubble when she was crouched next to the good Doctor, a gentle hand on his head and sheer madness in her eyes. There was pain and anger rolling from her in waves like the tide amplifies, washing out and away, but Harker was too far gone to notice. There was a bloody thumbprint on the left lense of his glasses, she noted idly._

_Harker's head was in her lap now, the rifle on the floor beside her thin leg. She stroked his hair back lovingly from his temple with one hand, feeling the broad contours of his skull, and with the other gently touched his cheek, rubbing her thumb in circles. He was breathing wrong now, trying to draw breath into a body that was on the verge of shutting off, his dying gasps provoking a profound sorrow inside Thirty-four's brilliantly-shattered mind._

"_You always took care of me," she whispered dreamily, eyes focused on his face whilst seeming very far away._

"_Yes," Harker gasped, his breath coming harsh, fingers clamped on his midriff and around the triangular shard of glass buried in it. "Yes, I always took care of you."_

"_Thank you," she continued, still with that faraway voice. "It made me feel very special." She kissed him on the forehead._

_Then she pulled the gun out from behind her back and, while still stroking his hair, laid his head back_ _and _there was that voice by her ear, still talking, and she became aware of the weight of the room against her shoulders. Violet was doubled over, on her knees, hands wrapped over and around her head. She was trembling violently, trying to keep the shameful memories in her head from spilling out onto the floor for all to see. There was no control left here, nothing. The cracks in her mind had widened, spilling out a poisonous substance like runny tar that mutated and covered everything.

There were hands on her shoulders and she tried to shrink away from them, but she was curled up as tightly as she would go.

"You killed him," that warm male voice said, and she fancied it was Harker. "You spilled his blood, but that's okay, because he _hurt_ you. After all, where would we be if we _didn't_ hurt the ones we love?"

Violet tried to reply to Harker but the words were stopped by a blockage in her throat. She was trying to talk to him in both the past and present, and until she figured out which was real then she'd be stuck like that. In the meantime, however, images clawed at her skull with the ferocity of acid, scenes of destruction and carnage interspersed with the improbable sight of a blurry blue floor. The sense of duality, the split between Thirty-four and Violet, was growing stronger.

She tried to fade away from the hands against her shoulders; she didn't want them there with a fearsome desperation. So she hunkered down and _laid his head back, braced the barrel of the rifle under his chin, and pulled the trigger._

"_Yes, you always took care of me," she said pointlessly, and then she realised he would never take care of her again._

_The sorrow that filled her was so massive that she did nothing but slump over Harker's corpse and cry, long wailing sobs that bespoke of the pain she had suffered and the man she had lost because of it all. It was all so... wrong. She should have met him differently, when she could have looked up to him and loved him properly. But he'd hurt her, and... and... hurt her, and she'd had to... m-make him go away..._

_She hugged his midriff to her face, cutting her face open on the long shard of glass without even realising it. The tears she cried were weak and pathetic, all she could muster after her explosion. It seemed fitting, somehow, that she should use up her energy for him after all she'd done._

But now he'llnever come back_, something in Thirty-four whispered, and she collapsed amid the tears and the blood and did not wake up for some time._

_When Violet did wake, the memories she'd decided to die with were locked safely away and all she could remember was the pain and not the sorrow_

"I didn't want him to die," she said and realised in which world she had said it. The real one, not the old one in her head. That version was done, despite how she carried it with her. But her mind didn't like that at all, and tried to drag her back. "No. No," she said into the gloom, trying to stay present. "_I didn't want him to die!_"

"But you meant him to die," said Harker, a little way from her. "You meant him to die and you were relieved when he was dead, no matter how much you loved him."

"_I didn't want him to die!_" she screamed then and threw herself upwards, grabbing onto Harker's blue shirt and pulling him close, screaming raw into his chest. "_I didn't mean for him to die but I did anyway and I miss him oh God I miss him!_"

The spontaneous anger that had supported her those few seconds left her abruptly and she crumpled downwards, crashing to her knees and doubling over, her surprisingly wet face in her hands. Her lungs shook with the effort of breathing, an unsteadiness she couldn't explain even in her broken state, short gasps that had no meaning.

"I didn't mean to kill him but I had to and now I want him back," she gasped, vision doubling and tripling as warm wetness marked its way down her face. "I hurt all over he wouldn't stop I had to make him know that it hurt I had to kill him I didn't want to _why won't he come back he said he would look after me –_"

"Shhh," said a voice above, and kind hands wrapped around her, pulling her against a warm body. She clutched at it in desperation, feeling the tremors rattle through her and the breath in her small body shake.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, trying to make Harker understand. "I didn't want to kill you, I wish you'd come back, I miss you, I love you."

"I'm here," was all he said and Violet felt herself relax. There were arms all about her body, tucking her up and curling her into his chest, a solid embrace that she was so scared of losing.

"Don't leave me," she whispered, and let the darkness curve around her like the antithesis of light into a black hole. There were bad dreams and images down there she didn't want to see but maybe she had to see them, to pay for what she'd done to Harker. She needed to pay for him and all the damage he'd caused, because he was her responsibility now. She had mourning to do and penance to see to.

She let herself drift into the dreams in the knowledge that, if she died down there, then at least she'd died doing the right thing.

_For Harker,_ she thought. _For you_. And she was gone.

* * *

_To be continued._


	9. ix

Bright eyes and brighter yet what lies beneath that glass surface. Cover this glistening thing up in shadows, slice it through and snicker snack! Off comes that dragon's head, still holds a grin at your feet. The bitter taste of victory comes in a deluge, pouring out of the orifices. Oh that sadistic love, that sick poison and what is there to save? It's all mechanical, poor puppet, what you were meant for from the start. And everyone dies, but it's not your turn, not yet, like it was his. You want to live for him? The lack of glasséd eyes and oaken hair makes you tip with drunken loss. It's all you can yet afford. Where is the beast now, his mortal filed off? Not this pile of harsh lit steel and bricks that you are confined to, surely._  
- crystalomnia__  
(edited for relevance)_

* * *

Dicker eyed the sergeant as one professional to another. Though entirely separated by military rank, they shared an air of grumpiness that did not extend to the others in the meeting, an urgency that was not felt by their immediate contemporaries.

"Let an American agent loose in the taiga?" one man was roaring in Russian-accented English. "Preposterous!" This was followed by what sounded like agreement from his cronies in indecipherable Russian.

A similar argument had been dancing back and forth in the U.S. embassy in Moscow for the last two and a half hours. Dicker was sat a way back from the arguments and next to the silent man with the sergeant's stripes and the general air of battle-weariness. In front of them, ranged un-diplomatically on either side of a table, were the Russian agents for the PCBK (the Russian equivalent of the American supers' alliance) and the NSA. Dicker spared a moment to wonder what PCBK stood for in its native Russian tongue.

He took another look around the meeting room. It was a tall-ceilinged beauty of a room, pleasantly-lit and aired. It was inlaid with fine panels and surfaces made out of some kind of hardwood, though not as hard and persistently dense as some of the skulls ranged around the table. Dicker was fighting a strong urge to get up, crack the heads of the spokesperson for each debate team together, and snap something sharp. Still, that probably wouldn't get him anywhere despite its tried-and-tested method. So, in deference to his years and the fact that youngsters today just weren't what they used to be, he had decided to let the two teams argue each other out.

The table itself, a long and wide marvel of perfectly-stained mahogany, was not littered with papers as it should have been. Instead, the two teams (six a side) were simply throwing an argument over the table and back again, an inelegant affair compromised of a long-winded and heavily-worded version of "No." / "Yes."/ "No." / "Yes." Dicker, seated next to the grumpy sergeant, was sat bang in the middle of the table with the American team on the side of the table to the right and the Russians on the left side. Dicker and his new associate marked out the boundary perfectly – a straight line across the table which neither party crossed, a dramatic divide between the country representatives currently engaged in a steady war of words. The divide was practically visible in the air; what Dicker considered "non-conducive to a mutual agreement." In his years of experience he'd found it best to mix the two opposing parties up in a loose circle and let them work out a compromise. But this wasn't a debate so much as devoutly contradicting each other, the Russians grimly determined not to let an American agent even step foot into the taiga.

It wasn't just the Russians who were at fault here, he reflected, watching the debate bounce back and forth like a well-rehearsed tennis match. The American team were decidedly lacklustre, unoriginal in their approach and stoutly uncompromising. Their arguments were not the speedy stealth diplomacy Dicker knew they could be; they were like old tanks blundering blindly ahead and simply trying to bulldoze over what stopped them short. They had all the efficiency and delicacy as a blind bull during the mating season, every single one of them aware of what would happen should their superiors discover they'd been shipped off to Russia without company permission, and it grated over Dicker's nerves. A situation like this – asking to to borrow a Russian army unit of several thousand troops plus change, permission to essentially invade part of their country to fish out a lost agent and the American maniac who had started his own little business on Russian soil, and all the vehicles associated with such a venture (costs to be borne by the Russian government, naturally), pretty pretty please with sprinkles on top – required elegant negotiating and salve for the Russians' prides, not this flat demand for vehicles and soldiers, and _now_, you communist _hippy_.

Well, the American team hadn't actually _said_ that, but Dicker could see it printed on the forefront of their brains. _We're the most powerful nation on Earth,_ the gaps between their blocky, lumbering words whined, self-justified by years of government service and its associated jingoistic propaganda. _Gimme what I want and gimme it _now.

Dicker wondered if a team of negotiators whose fathers _hadn't_ bought them their college places would have done better.

The Russians (quite understandably) had take umbrage at the whole thing, although with a semi-religious fervour and a sort of furious, jingoistic delight that Dicker found distasteful in the extreme. They seemed simply _appalled_,_ shocked_ even, that the Americans had even _dared_ ask such a thing. How incredibly presumptuous of them, those fascist-capitalist corporate-pig whores.

Dicker was becoming heartily sick of the whole affair, hyperaware that every second that passed increased the chances of Violet's return to home soil in a horizontal and un-breathing state. He leaned over the the sergeant seated next to him, and murmured, "How long do you think they'll take?"

"Could be hours, days, even," responded the man promptly in low, clear, unaccented English. Dicker tossed the man another glance, but threw a little shrewd calculation in as well. The sergeant was a man so thin as to be almost skinny, with nondescript light-brown hair and a curious scar across the palm of one of his hands.

"Is there nothing we can do to speed this up?"

"No. My crew think you have managed to 'lose' an agent mid-country, and regard your team as inept and bumbling as only Americans can be."

"My lot think you Russians are being backwards and stubborn, clinging to the edifice of an old argument that was settled decades ago, and bearing a pointless grudge as only Russians can."

"It is just as well we do not think like them, hmm?"

Dicker allowed himself the first smile in days, and relaxed into his hard chair a fraction. "Agent Rick Dicker."

"Sergeant Aleksei Zharov."

Dicker tuned half an ear back to the proceedings. He could _hear_ the tension in the air building in the same way a good chef knows a pot is near to boiling over with no visible sign. The animosity was growing thick. You could have cut bricks of it out of the air and sold it as cheap building material.

"We need to stop this," he said, voice low as to go undetected by the enraged participants. The sergeant nodded his head with an urgency Dicker found oddly endearing. Now, what would get these patriotic idiots to stop their bickering and pay attention?

"Are you any good at creative thinking?" he asked Zharov out of the corner of his mouth. The sergeant gave it due consideration.

"I am a member of the military, Agent Dicker. Creative thinking and interpretation is not encouraged. However, I feel I could make an exception."

"Good man."

Dicker threw another expert eye over the debate, which was now heating up to dangerous proportions. Dicker knew the score; in these kinds of arguments, _all_ the old grievances were dragged out. The Russians were well into a structured dismantling of the American political system and its many ("nay, _innumerable_") flaws, and the Americans' cutting replies about the "'wonders' of Communism throughout history" showed how they were slowly approaching their boiling point. All it would need would be for someone – anyone – to mention Cuba, and then everything would go to Hell in a handbasket.

His movements theatrically designed to be seen by everyone in the room, Dicker stood up. Following his lead, Zharov joined him half a second later.

"I take it this discussion is not going to concluded in the next ten minutes?" Dicker said loudly, looking at neither party in particular. There was a general chorus of dissent from both sides, expressed in a defiant but mumbled voice. Next to him, Zharov shrugged hopelessly.

"Well, if you are going to take some time, may I borrow your Agent Dicker?" asked Zharov, addressing everyone at the table. "I have some minor matters to discuss with him, such as the report of his agent on the base's possible nuclear weapo–"

There was an instant clamour at the table, and Dicker's impression of the man shot through the roof. This humble sergeant was a genius; nay, a _mastermind_. He had mentioned the one thing that would capture the attention of both the Russian confederates and the Americans: possible American-owned nuclear weaponry on Russian soil. If anything would ensure a fast collaboration between the two opposing parties, it would be this. Patriotism and fear of an international incident working in tandem; what a beautiful thing, he reflected. Dicker could hear the teams shouting at each other in panic-stricken, legal-jargon-filled voices and allowed himself a shrewd smile.

"– no U.S. responsibility for this base, an illegal immigrant –"

"– need your last-known co-ordinates of the base, with –"

"– Russia will have complete penal control over any prisoners, to –"

The voices flitted backwards and forwards and now the papers poured from briefcases. Files were exchanged, notes swapped, numbers crunched and figures tallied. The previously-ranked diplomats and strategists were now mixed in completely together, with Dicker and Zharov sucked into the centre as the two most well-informed of the entire charade. Within minutes, the Russians had allocated a portion of its army to the endeavour and the Americans had funded half of it. Zharov and Dicker acted as intermediaries and were so busy that it wasn't until two hours later, flying north and east of Moscow in an army helicopter, that Dicker thought to ask Zharov why he was so involved.

"I was assigned to Agent Violet," came the short reply over his headphones. Dicker smiled, low and heartfelt.

"It's something about her," Dicker said. He thought for a moment and said, at exactly the same time as Zharov, "She needs someone to protect her."

The two men exchanged a knowing smile.

"Just for now. Whether she knows it or not," Zharov added softly. They flew the rest of the way to Noril'sk in silence.

--I--

"How'd it go?"

"Well." A pause. "I think."

Nikolaevsky exhaled and leaned his chair back to balance on its two hind legs, hands folded behind his head in an honest portrayal of relaxation. His eyes were narrowed and thoughtful. His long, broad frame looked oddly out of place on the normal-sized chair.

"Will she tell you what you want to know?" he asked.

"Probably. I think so. I'm pretty sure of it."

"You don't sound that certain."

The Boss leaned back in his chair with a frustrated sigh and ran his hand through his hair, leaving it sticking out in odd ripples. Nikolaevsky observed this with calm detachment of a practised observer on his side of the highly-polished wooden desk.

"Frankly, Nikolaevsky, I just don't know what to expect. I pushed her pretty hard, thinking maybe if I got her angry enough she'd yell at me how she really felt about Harker and _then_, finally, she would feel free enough to tell me what I needed to know about her accomplice."

"She didn't?"

The Boss held up a photograph, one liberated from the girl's file.

"Looks bad, doesn't it?" asked the Boss casually. "All of it. It looks pretty brutal. But I hadn't banked on the psychological impact. I pressed her, thinking I'd just make her angry, but all I succeeded in doing was pushing her into a psychotic break."

Nikolaevsky whistled softly. The echo bounced around the giant control room, clear without crowds of people to muffle the noise. It had been an hour since the Boss had called the Commander to the control room, the control screen a neutral beige colour. Nikolaevsky knew that the Boss wanted simply to rant at him, or pick his brains for ideas. He was a good listener and a good thinker, and he knew it. The Boss frequently treated him as a rank equal (and, to some extent, his shrink and his conscience). Nikolaevsky didn't mind; it added spice to his days and besides, being in the good books of the Boss was no bad thing.

"That bad?"

"Yes, Nikolaevsky, that bad. I only hope there's enough left of her to answer my questions."

Nikolaevsky leaned over the desk suddenly, casting his relaxed air to the wayside. The Boss looked up in suspicion, instantly on the defensive, and Nikolaevsky knew that the Boss had realised what he himself had.

"What's this?" he asked in a low, dangerous voice. "When did this stop being about answers and start being about the girl?"

"It hasn't," the Boss snapped back, and Nikolaevsky heard the edge in his voice. He leaned back, still crucially aware of who paid his salary. The Boss leaned back as well when Nikolaevsky backed down, rubbing his forehead with the heel of one hand. "I have expended so much time and resources into her that I feel like I own part of her."

"And thus are responsible," said Nikolaevsky flatly. "You're feeling responsible and... guilty? About what happened to her?" _And its not just 'time and resources'_, he added silently. _You have taken an active interest. I've never seen you before go to such lengths for answers, such personal and emotional investments. She's affected you. You're_ responding _to her. You_ touched _her, and you've continued to do so. Firsts for you both times, there._

The Boss sighed to himself and scowled. "I suppose that, to some extent, I am responsible. But I don't feel guilty about it." There was truth enough in that for Nikolaevsky to let it slide, but he still wasn't pleased. "I've never forced someone to have a breakdown before, Commander, and it's shaken me."

_Has it indeed,_ mused Nikolaevsky sourly, aware that it was not the Boss' job to be shaken by an underling. Aloud, he said "Please, Boss, listen to me. I understand that you need this information, but you've gotten in deep with this girl. I'll bet she'll only talk to you now, if she's talking at all when she wakes up. You look at her like she's this 'Thirty-four' experiment but _she_ doesn't show any of the signs that she's meeting a new person. She _knows_ you, or knew you before she got here, which suggests this was a planned mission. Someone out there knows about you. There may be a mole in the base. Please, Boss, for all of us, get this information as soon as you can. The people could be in danger. Most of them wouldn't know what self-defence was even if you demonstrated it stark naked."

It was a bold move, rude, and almost as if he was telling the man what to do with his time. Fortunately, Nikolaevsky saw the Boss seriously consider his suggestion and finally nod in decision despite a worrying moment of deliberation.

"Yeah. You're right. The faster she's off our hands and gone, the better, right?"

Nikolaevsky felt a fervent relief. He knew this girl spelled trouble and she had not finished bringing it. He didn't have anything personal against her, but he had a hunch that this would not end well.

Nikolaevsky trusted his hunches.

--I--

Violet awoke to the sensation that she was breathing properly for the first time in years. The cubic space in her lungs had multiplied centrefold, or a metal band had been removed from her chest. Either way, the air in her body felt lighter and cleaner than ever before.

She was horizontal, and covered with a light blanket. It was warm, and she was drowsily comfortable. There was light shining through the lids of her eyes. She frowned and passed the back of her hand over them, sitting up slightly.

A wracking cough shook her body then, suddenly and without warning. Her lungs felt dry and sandpapery, her throat an itchy mess of irritated flesh. She bent over at the waist, leaning over her own legs, one hand pressed against her mouth as the coughs went on.

Violet felt a hand against the base of her neck, and a soft voice said "Drink."

She took the cup that hovered in the corner of her vision and drank. It was soup, good and hot and thick. The coughing and irritation in her throat eased away as energy seeped through her body, leaving Violet awake and fully with the world.

She glanced to her right and saw Syndrome sitting in a high-backed swivel chair, leaning forwards with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped together and with a vaguely amused, yet concerned, expression on his face. He wore a pale mint-green shirt that picked out the green influences in his eyes, and under that a black tee. He was as tieless as he always was.

"Nice shirt," she said, and was rewarded by a moment's surprise. That was evidently the last thing he'd been expecting. Violet allowed herself a small smile and drained the rest of the glass, handing it back when she had finished. Syndrome took the glass without looking away from her and placed it with a click on a table just behind Violet's line of sight.

"How do you feel?" Syndrome asked, and that was suitably un-Syndrome enough to maker her mind reel back to the hours before.

_Not again,_ she thought.

Instantly, defences slammed into place, sheet metal rising behind her eyes. But it wasn't working, something hadn't clicked into place properly, because instead of the void she needed and was expecting there was something there. A heavy weight of pain sat in her chest and was busily undermining her strength from the inside, trying to tear down her barricades. Her emotions were not under control, they were trying to control _her_.

Violet looked away from him then, aware on some level that she'd been manipulated by the genius with the lion's smile. He'd played her, quietly and professionally, twisting her reactions and her feelings until she had become what she was now. She hated him for it, hated him for destroying her control like that, hated him for laying waste to who she was as a person. She glared at the wall beside her, arms wrapped about her knees, pressed into the futon below her by the twinned weights of gravity and a despair she refused to acknowledge.

What was she now? Was she something that Syndrome had made? Violet sincerely doubted that, judging from her capacity still to surprise him. All the pain and hate was sitting in her chest, trying to rise up to her mind through her throat. She refused to let it, clamping down, feeling her grip slipping slightly.

"I didn't want to kill him," she said in a low voice, steadfastly not looking at Syndrome. It seemed very important that she say that, as much for herself as it was for him. No, she hadn't wanted to kill him, but... but she'd had no choice.

Violet recognised that for the lie it was, but it took her a moment to do so. No, she'd had a choice. She could have gone on with Harker and died, alone and lost, at the bottom of that mineshaft of a laboratory. It didn't still the raw anguish or the low ache in her sinuses that threatened tears. She hauled them back with a semi-panicked jolt.

"How did you find me?" asked Syndrome softly. Violet shrugged and looked at her knees.

"An anomaly, a base heat signature. The rest was intuition and a few informed guesses."

"Why did you come here?"

"I was sent to investigate. I think my superiors considered it a break for me." She laughed bitterly for a moment.

The Boss leaned back a little in his chair, aware that he didn't want to overcrowd her. She was talking, finally, in a flat and emotionless voice that was oddly hopeless. At least she was talking at all, he reminded himself. It had been touch-and-go for her a few times in her sleep.

Finally. Answers.

"Who was your friend?" he asked gently, watching her for signs of defensiveness. He'd only seen it the once, and was trying to keep it at bay.

"He was assigned to me for the trip. A man in the wrong place at the wrong time."

He noted how she'd deftly avoided revealing any personal information about the man and filed that under 'touchy subject'. He also noticed how she'd said "assigned"; a military presence, then, a man who was no doubt informing his superiors at this very moment of the base's location and weaknesses.

"How did you get in here?"

"How did you survive your plane explosion?"

That, for the Boss, was beyond unexpected. The question had tripped from the girl's lips without hesitation and her eyes bore the same expression they had thirty seconds ago. She was as unpredictable as the grave.

He leaned back in his chair and narrowed his eyes slightly, thumb touching the corner of his mouth. "Why do you want to know?"

"Why do you want to know all these things about _me?_"

Fair point, he conceded.

"There was... a fight," he said carefully. _Steady on the details. The less, the better_. "I was in it. On the way back to my plane, I got... stuck in one of the engines." He paused delicately, trying to phrase the words, unconsciously stroking an invisible line on his throat that had once shown a now long-gone surgical scar. "It tried to suck me in, but I froze it. With a special device. It froze the blades, and also froze the pumping action of the compressor, backing up the whole fuel supply. When the fuel was ignited in the compression chamber with the intention of propelling the craft forward, it set fire to the fuel supply line and reached the main tank." His smile at that was utterly humourless. "Now: how did you get in here?"

"Through the ventilation." Her answer was flat and fast, too mindless to have been a lie.

Well, _that_ was unexpected. The scans had shown no power fluctuations or irregularities and he had looked for both. _Thoroughly_. He frowned, puzzled, and leaned forward again.

"How? The heat filters should have killed you."

"How did you survive the explosion and the fall?"

He frowned harshly, angry at being diverted again. The girl's face was pale and set, and reminded the Boss forcibly of a last-stand charge. This girl was not going to shift from her own line or reasoning, her skewed logic allowing her to feel a quid-pro-quo trade of information was acceptable. Well, in light of the answers he would get, the Boss figured it was a fair trade.

"I was protected from the initial explosion by the sides of the engine, and I survived the fall by controlling my descent with a rocket booster I had, as much I was able to. But the thing is, in a fight between a large metal craft and gravity, the ground has yet to lose." His smile was fixed in place like a living rictus, a portrait gone wrong, a bloodied photograph. It wouldn't loosen. "There was a lot of shrapnel and flying clouds of burning jet-fuel. I lived, but that's about all you could say. I needed extensive skin grafts and emergency surgery, and months later I had plastic surgery to reconstruct the damage." He took a deep breath. "I just about survived the whole thing. How did you get past the heat filters?"

"Used my powers."

_What could have done that?_ he wondered, anger mixing in with the confusion, clouding his thoughts. He'd checked for everything: influences, abnormalities, the power supply, function, _everything_...

"How did you get help so fast from the explosion?" she asked then, suddenly and fiercely. He glared at her as his temper reached critical mass, angry at having to dredge up old memories he'd decided were best forgotten, an irony that missed him entirely.

Thirty-four raised an eyebrow at his continued silence and the simple gesture knocked a few points from his patience. He leaned forward in a deliberate movement meant to warn her off. "I was so disfigured the emergency crews didn't know who I was," he said slowly through gritted teeth. "The operations I had at the hospital only saved my life, they didn't restore my appearance. As soon as I was recovered enough from the surgeries, I gave them a fake name attached to offshore accounts, money unseized by the NSA, and that covered the medical bills without drawing attention to myself. As soon I was stable I checked out of there and into a privately-owned hospital, where _my_ surgeons reconstructed... what needed reconstructing. The money paid for everything and also gave me a handhold into this economy business I have going here. It fixed me up, set me up, and _what are your powers?_"

"What are you doing here now?" she asked, coldly ignoring his question.

He stood up then, movements dramatic as to emphasise the fact that his anger was a single degree from erupting and tearing her apart with the force of the blast.

"Answer my question," he whispered, every bit of his body pulling taught and demanding the girl's blood as a sacrifice.

"Answer mine and I'll answers yours," she replied boldly, looking fearlessly into his eyes. It was her complete lack of reaction to his anger that finally cooled him off; she'd seen worse than him, and nothing he could do to her would ever measure up. So he sat himself back down, bidding his temper wait five more minutes.

"I used what money I had left to set up a portfolio of stocks I knew would perform well. I then hired financial experts to branch out into the technological sector and to keep it growing. I ended up making more money from companies who stole my inventions than I ever did from selling the things," he added with a dry, furious smile. "And then I set a huge section aside for you supers." He leaned forward suddenly then, hands clenched into fists on his knees. "Because the whole reason I was in that explosion, the whole reason I got into that entire situation in the first place, was a man called Robert Parr – a super named _Mr. Incredible._"

The Boss spat those words out like they were a rare nectar, mouth forming around the letters in a parody of respect. All this time he'd thought he'd been okay around her, not allowing her super status room in his mind. Now it was a fact in prime attention and all the old injuries had started to ache again, like war wounds on rainy days. _She_ was supposed to be the one losing control, _she_ was the one with the memories of dried blood and forgotten screams. It was supposed to be _her_ reliving things she didn't want to see.

"He destroyed me," he continued, trying hard not to snarl. "He took the life of a ten-year-old kid and turned it into nothing. _Nothing_. My entire purpose from that moment on was about him, and correcting the balance – doing to him what he did to me. So I took an interest in you people, tried to figure out what made you so damn special, how to break you, how I could break _him_. You got caught in that interest, isn't that a _shame_. And I will find him someday," he said confidently, eyes gleaming. "Not on purpose. Hopefully by chance. And then I will make him pay like I couldn't last time."

His teeth were ground together so hard that the muscles in his cheek stood out, making his jaw hurt with a low beat like the tramp of footsteps across a bridge. The girl sat back at last, seemingly satisfied, although there was little probing her expression. She was just too blank.

"I see," she said tonelessly, eyes focused into the middle distance. He could see the machinations going on behind the blank purple stare extracting more information from his unplanned outburst than he himself had.

He kept his breathing steady, trying to dampen down the unexpected hatred that had risen within him. It was an emotion he'd thought he was done with, locked up in a box in his head along with the motivations he refused to accept were part of his everyday behaviour and his long-term plans. The hatred inside him that had been brought to the fore twisted and turned like a sticky black creature, snarling and biting and tearing his insides out. He forced it away with ease of practise, gagged and bound it and thrust it deep into the darkness. Unclenching his hands, he forced his mind onto other rails.

"So, little Thirty-four, young and oh-so-tortured." There was bitter sarcasm in his voice. "_What_ are your powers?"

The girl looked up at him then and he felt something fall into place in his mind, like a mostly-completed 3D jigsaw puzzle. There was something he needed to know, something just beyond his reach...

She smiled at him and there was something dreadful about it – some Godawful quality that made him think she was dead for a moment, dead and rising again.

"You want to know what my powers are?"

Her voice was calm and innocently mocking, eyes with a hint of craziness that suggested a slipping grip on the bar of sanity. The Boss tensed and straightened up with harshness reflected in every nuance of expression, eyes flicking between hers as the pieces struggled to put themselves together.

"Do you, Syndrome?"

He stood up sharply then, the chair flying away, crashing over. His fists were clenched. She knew his name. His _old_ name, one that he hadn't used for years. She'd lied to him. She'd known he was here all along. She knew about his old self, she knew everything, knew the gaps in the story he'd told her –

Her face became instantly familiar to him in that second but he still couldn't place it, desperately tripping through his memory banks for a glimpse of those cold purple eyes. So close, so close to him, and yet so far away –

She stood up from the bed in careful, delicate movements, face-to-chest with him, separated by a couple of feet of space. There was a gleefully crazy expression on her face, the look someone might wear when they're halfway down the cliff and accelerating, well aware they were over the edge and couldn't go back. His eyes combed her face in calculated patterns, looking for the last piece that would stick the whole puzzle together, explain_ everything_. Why Harker had picked her as a strong super, what her powers were, how she'd gotten in, her _name_. Not Thirty-four, that short handle she'd worn for a while, but her _real_ name.

"I got in," she said sweetly, "by slipping past your defences. I managed this because I a have a useful knack with shields. And I can do _that_ because my name is Violet Parr."

* * *

For those who are concerned: no offense is meant to either country in this chapter. The observations made are in reference to the characters and not their nationalities. I'm British and therefore neutral, so no accusations of taking sides, please.

* * *

_To be continued._


	10. x

"Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them."  
_- Georges Bataille_

* * *

"I got in," she said sweetly, "by slipping past your defences. I managed this because I have a useful knack with shields. And I can do _that_ because my name is Violet Parr."

Time crystallised around him right then, a solid shock of a moment that froze him in place as the puzzle came together with a click that snapped through him. He felt made of spun glass, surrounded by a thin clear candy-coating, dangerously balanced and precariously placed. The blind rage rose inside him like bubbling magma and finally exploded from his mouth in a roar that propelled him forwards.

Violet was ready for the vicious outburst and jumped backwards, forewarned by the look of pure hatred on his normally-unassuming features and the story of anger he had told her. Her body was faster than her mind and her training took over, forcing her frame into a crouching defensive stance whilst her conscious mind tripped over the possibilities. She'd known it would anger him but had thought it would have been the cold vitriol of an old enemy. Not this ferocious outburst, more akin with a deep psychological wound... like torture.

She ducked and weaved, staying beyond his grasp as he grabbed for her. His balance was off a little, though, and she had superiority of speed and skill. She slipped around him quickly, ducked as he turned, slid to the left and used his own momentum to throw him off-centre. Moving with a deftness and dexterity she'd trained long months to achieve, she wrenched his arm up behind his back and pinned the other. With her fingers on his nerve points to immobilise certain motor functions, she forced him to his knees as he snarled and tried to twist her off.

She pressed her lithe form against his broad back, keeping her fingers in contact with his body to keep him from throwing her off and using her senses as a monitoring system to predict sudden movements. She could feel his heavy breathing through her chest and the way his muscles jumped through the doubled fabric of his tee and shirt. There was something odd about this whole thing, a surreal quality that only struck her when she realised that they'd somehow managed to swap roles entirely.

While all this had been going on, some little office in the back of her mind had been going haywire. She liked to think of it as her logic centre, the place she looked to when faced with a particularly puzzling challenge – like the one that got her here. It had been poring over Syndrome's behaviours and making crucial connections and comparisons, drawing startling parallels between him and herself. There was something about his reaction that reminded her of herself... like some buried pain finally making its way to the fore with the introduction of the one stressor that was enough to break his mental control.

Manipulating his body via his nerve points (and without losing a sense of irony at that), she tipped his head back. When his throat was exposed and vulnerable, unwillingly submissive and under her temporary control, she leaned up until her mouth could reach his ear and spoke words she hadn't planned. Words that were utterly instinctual as though her subconscious was directly wired to her tongue by way of her vocal cords, bypassing her rational mind.

"Tell me about Mr. Incredible," she murmured.

He stilled instantly below her, an unexpected cessation of movement that made her freeze with him. Slowly, she moved her arms away, freeing his movement whilst remaining in close proximity.

Violet knew that _he_ knew she'd figured him out. Figured _everything_ out.

The moment was severed by a new type of light cracking into the room and the sound of the door moving back on its hinges.

It was Nikolaevsky.

He paused in the doorway as his eyes sharpened to the problem inherent in the scene in front of him.

His stance changed instantly, from easily passive into furiously aggressive. The man (all six feet and eight inches of him) had looked mild and relaxed, but now he glinted with new fury, an invisible darkness all about himself. There was light in the room but even more in the corridor, and Nikolaevsky was almost a silhouette of anger. The lines of his shoulders and the taper of his waist were harsh (especially under the thick, kevlar-plate armour), his legs were long and locked, and his hands were clenched tightly into fists. He was growling.

His eyes were focused on Violet and her aggressive stance towards his boss, and Violet threw herself to the side without thinking more.

Nikolaevsky missed her by centimetres.

Violet didn't allow herself to roll and lose momentum. Instead, she shifted her centre of balance and bounced as best she could, phasing out. She moved back fast, quietly, and tried to get her bearings.

Syndrome was glaring around himself, fists clenched and with a sheer snarl on his features mixing in with delayed shock. There was little colour in his face and his breathing was unsteady, as though dazed by an uppercut. For a moment he looked like two people: one, confused and shocked, hurting a little from something best forgotten and trying to shrink away. The other was infinitely more aggressive, angry, determined to lash out and to push back.

That first Syndrome was gone within moments, leaving the pure rage behind to take its stead.

There was a loud slam as Nikolaevsky kicked the door shut in one vicious movement, trapping them all inside. The fury within him did not appear to abate.

Nikolaevsky lunged suddenly, toward her, and Violet moved away smoothly. It was a guess of a jump and easily predictable. She turned her attention to Syndrome and tried to clear her mind from the newly-building sensation of headache.

"Do you know what you're doing?" Syndrome demanded, glaring right at Nikolaevsky. The burly Russian mindlessly grunted an affirmative and stopped moving, staring at the ceiling.

Violet looked up and saw nothing. Wary, she moved a little further from him and used long, lithe movements to avoid making noise. Nikolaevsky was slowly unholstering the weapon hung cowboyishly from his hip without breaking his eerie stare from the ceiling.

Then, in one smooth and well-practised movement, he gripped the stock of the handgun in both hands and fired three rounds into the ceiling. At the same time, he cocked his head and shut his eyes, and as soon as the echoes had died away he turned to face her. There was a triumphant snarl plastered haphazardly on his face, as though he weren't really paying attention to it.

Violet crouched down as low as she could go and slid, but she wasn't fast enough. This unexpected echo-trick of Nikolaevsky's had put her off-balance, its originality and inventiveness startling her. He'd used the echoes to map out the room, to identify where the noise wasn't... where it was blocked by her solid body.

Nikolaevsky's hand closed abruptly about her shoulder and she moved toward him, using the man's own momentum as energy. She jumped then, pushed off his midriff with both feet and turned in the air to land neatly on two feet and a hand, the other thrown out for balance. Nikolaevsky didn't even need recovery time; he was up and throwing himself toward her location without pause, heavy build belying the speed and sharpness he was capable of. She was still invisible but her landing trajectory would have been easy enough to predict by someone with the right mental computational skills, so she used her kinetic energy to bounce away.

When his hands failed to grasp his wayward prisoner, Nikolaevsky abruptly stilled. He shut his eyes and cocked his head, and Violet realised he was using a similar technique to the one he had employed with the handgun. She froze instantly, trying not to make any noise.

It seemed to be working. He stayed totally immobile, a faint frown on his rugged features, his heavily-muscled body bent into an improbably graceful form.

Violet was struck then by the sheer raw sexuality of the man; it was unvarnished and powerful, emphasised by the white lighting of the room. It cast surreal shadows into the gaps of the heavily-plated grey armour, revealing once again the depth of his shoulders, the girth of muscle on his form, and the ridiculous height of the man who had (indirectly) caused her to ache and suffer. The light threw shade into the hollows of his skin, particularly at his throat, where its two framing tendons cast triangular wedges of shadows off to the side. There was something both ferociously animal and ferociously civilised about him, a quality that attracted her as a girl and appealed to her as a fighter.

"Boss?" said Nikolaevsky quietly. "Might need a little backup here."

Syndrome nodded, pushing his already-rolled sleeves higher up on his arms. He was staring intently into the middle distance, a blank look in his eyes and a calculating expression on his face. The combination was eerily frightening; it was that of a pure pragmatist, of a man who has had all personal involvement with a situation removed. It was a man trying to use the resources he had at his disposal to his best possible advantage.

Violet started to edge silently toward the door.

"You're trapped in an unfamiliar environment, with two hostile presences," said Syndrome suddenly into the silence, a thoughtful frown on his features marring the anger. He knew that his own advantage here was superiority of intellect, so he was going to use chain logic to figure it out. "You're injured and weakened, but you still have an aggressive capacity. You're also a good tactician and you know how to calculate the odds. Which means..."

His thoughts seemed to trail off at that point, but his eyes were moving back and forth as he pieced the logic together. She could see the solution being formed in his mind, like a wonderful piece of architecture being constructed section by section. There was something chilling about him like that, something robotic and not-quite-human, a little malicious. Violet narrowed her eyes and sped up her creep to the door, recognising the mode of thought. It was one that she herself used on a regular basis.

Her hand touched the handle of the door, and as she changed her grip to fit around it, Syndrome finished his sentence.

"... that your current objective is... _escape_."

Nikolaevsky and Syndrome moved as one and leapt toward the door. Violet gasped for the oxygen boost and twisted, Nikolaevsky's hands just missing her. Syndrome landed brutal fingers into the hollow of her collarbone and she curved away, moving awkwardly and rolling as best she could. The two men moved around to face her position, Nikolaevsky with the distinct physical advantage (a better fighter than Syndrome could ever hope to be) but they both knew where she was and closed in mercilessly as a team. Violet twisted backwards, buying ground at the expense of her mobility while staying low, hoping for an opening. There wasn't one. She only had one option.

Violet shot forward suddenly, feeling the familiar satisfying slide of smooth air over her skin with the superbly-controlled acceleration. Something fierce exploded inside her then – the joy of the fight – and she let it carry her.

She had never intended it to be an escape. As she dived between them they felt the brush of her form and grabbed on instinct, but all they got was handfuls of her shirt, looser on her thinned and pulled-taught frame. She landed on her hands and twisted her body around and over, forcing their grips down and closer. The action wrapped their fingers into the material, trapping them. Her shirt gave out under the strain and ripped but she barely noticed, following through on the flip, entangling their hands in the cloth so that they lost their hold on her and destroyed the little defensive wall they'd constructed. As the material of her shirt was torn away from her body it suddenly became visible, obscuring the men's hands, and they crashed to the floor. Their balances were destroyed by trying to compensate for the sudden movement and each other.

Violet was moving away then on her own momentum, stretched to burning point, when Nikolaevsky's hand shot out. He gripped her ankle by chance and pulled. She crashed to the floor without leverage and resorted to sheer force to break his grip. It didn't work. Nikolaevsky landed his other hand on her ankle and pulled again, forcing her under his heavy form as he struggled to pin her while using the weight and the depth of his shoulders to track her movements. Violet pulled her knees up and thrust outward with her feet, the impact hitting the man in the solar plexus. He grunted, expelling air. It gave her enough space to break his shaken hold and to roll out and away, to spiral upwards to her feet, to know she was still invisible and doing well.

It was what chess must have felt like with added speed and adrenaline, she thought crazily. The neat way the movements fell together, the deft way she could manipulate the two men... it was breathless and exiting, a raw energy that powered her.

Nikolaevsky had also rolled the movement with a low-slung grace, his arms multiplying his balance so he could use his own momentum to regain control. He leapt forwards again. His aim was a little off and he didn't quite hit her invisible form dead-on, a fact Violet used to change her stance. He struck her back and shoulder with his chest and she moved over suddenly, leaving him spinning toward the floor. He caught himself in a moment of superb balance-shifting and used that momentum to swing around again.

Syndrome, meanwhile, had been watching the odd, half-invisible struggle and had evidently been making plans of his own. When Violet straightened herself into her next attack brace he was already there, having watched Nikolaevsky's movements and making his own predictions. Angry hands that sought to hurt her closed blindly on her arms and shoulder. She swept a foot into his abdomen, hard, and used the rebound to twist backwards and away. She hit the wall with her back while surveying the scene with a practised predator's eye, and was ready for Nikolaevsky's punch and subsequent block when it came. She ducked deftly, allowed her predictable responding blow to be parried, slid around him with a hipshot fluidity well-practised and swept out his legs from under him.

But his fall was not as controlled as she thought it would be. He fell roughly and heavily, deliberately off-balance, and this allowed him a sweep of his arm. His hand smacked into the side of her hip, grasped a belt loop of her combats, and pulled.

Violet went down suddenly, falling with the amplified speed that came from the well-levered movement. She hit the floor without grace and Nikolaevsky used her instinctive half-moment of winded shock to clamp down on her, gripping her forcefully and rolling to bring them both upright. He turned suddenly, holding her bare arms still in his robotically powerful grip, and slammed her back-first into the wall. She gave up her invisibility in that one brief movement as her breath shook in her body, and didn't even try to fight him. The side of his hip pinned her to the wall, allowing her no leverage as his hands moved rattlesnake-like to pin her hands now that he could see them.

There was a moment of pure stillness and then Nikolaevsky reared his head back some, angry puzzlement replacing the adrenaline-inspired rage. Violet's hair partially concealed her face, short as it was, but there was no mistaking the way her thin form shook.

She was laughing.

As soon as she noticed that Nikolaevsky had spotted her suppressed mirth, the laughter burst forth with full power. Her legs weakened and buckled at the knees, pain digging into her sides as she laughed so hard that she thought she'd pass out. There were gooey tears in her eyes mixing into the rising thud of her headache and the only thing now supporting her was the heavy proximity of the man pinning her.

Nikolaevsky threw a shocked glance to his boss, who returned the look with a steely flat expression that was his version of grim puzzlement. Violet let her head fall forward onto the Russian's chestplate, shoulders shaking, tears trying to force their way out. She couldn't stop laughing, her grip on the situation finally shaken loose. Here she was, black combats and halter, hideously be-scarred, and somehow that seemed completely ridiculous. The remains of her shirt, hopelessly abused and now finally useless, lay on the floor some way away. It occurred to Violet that it really should still be invisible, and she laughed all the harder.

Syndrome took several mean steps forward, reaching around Nikolaevsky's chest to grip Violet's chin. Her laughter tapered off then, her hysteria winding down, but the insane smile was still on her face and her headache didn't abate. In fact, it was beginning to evolve into a full-grown migraine, and she had no pills to help her this time.

Nothing to help her at all.

Syndrome looked down on her, frowning, puzzled, but not quite snarling. Violet felt the urge to explain to him the whole situation.

"All this time," she gasped, trying to control her breathing. "All this time and you never figured out who I was. I had you down from day _one_, and it took you _this long_to figure out I was his _daughter_, a-and..."

The laughter cranked up a notch and she saw with a distant dismay how close to collapsing from hysteria she was. She recognised the laughing for what it was: a coping mechanism.

Nikolaevsky, seemingly content that she was not going to make another aggressive move, cautiously let go of her and stepped back. Violet bent over slightly and braced her hands on her legs. _All the better for clearing the mirth from your system, my dear_, she thought.

"Boss?" Nikolaevsky rumbled, face puzzled and suspicious, with the expression of a man who is left out of the loop or hasn't gotten the in-joke. "_Do_ you know her?"

"I do now."

Syndrome's voice was flat and inflectionless, as cold and dead as his eyes appeared to be. The sight of his reaction was so familiar as to shock Violet back to sobriety. His was the expression she had seen on her own face for the last four years. She straightened up, still backed against the wall, her own eyes flatly locked with his, humour falling away like faulty armour.

"Commander, go inform Tactical. There will be an Army presence with us soon. Her mission was reconnaissance, nothing more, but her partner had military connections. Go raise the defences. I have more questions to ask."

"Should I take them down with an EMP?"

"No. I want to see where this goes."

Nikolaevsky did nothing for a long moment. He looked back and forth between Violet and Syndrome uncertainly, like a child watching his parents arguing. Childlike as he was, he knew the danger that Violet posed his Boss and seemed reluctant to be dismissed so readily.

"Boss... she –"

"Go, Commander."

Nikolaevsky knew when he was pushing his luck. He turned wrathful eyes on Violet for a moment, warning without words what would happen later should anything... go awry. Violet returned his stare blankly.

Nikolaevsky turned his back with some reluctance, the frown on his face marking his better judgement. There was a dull bruise coming up on the lower side of his left cheek to evidence where Violet had landed a particularly heavy blow. His eyes dipped between the two he would be leaving in the room, once, twice. Conceding his boss' superiority, he opened the door but paused a moment before leaving completely.

He glanced back one more time. His Boss and the girl were staring at each other with a familiar intensity so powerful it made his brain ache. There was a lot of negative emotion there, a lot of anger that went unsaid, and the Boss had lost that focused, puzzled look he'd so often worn around the girl. He'd figured out who she was, and that, at least, made her less of a threat.

He shut the door behind him.

--I--

Violet kept herself on the balance points of her feet, ready to move fast if she needed to. Syndrome was stood solidly on his feet, a stance that radiated anger and perhaps a lethal intention.

"Parr," he said, rolling the word around in his mouth slightly, jaw moving with a fluidity that defied his unnaturally still form. "Violet _Parr_." His lips twisted into what might have been a smile, containing absolutely no humour whatsoever. "_My_, don't you look different."

Everything about him had changed. Mere minutes ago he had been calm and warm, understanding despite his hurry for information. Now coldness radiated from him like snow chilling the air, touching him colourless. His lips were thinned and pale, his skin oddly bloodless. His eyes had a dry sheen – as though they had turned to ice in his skull. He had changed his stance, too; gone were the easy, loose motions and the freedom of movement. Instead, he held himself carefully and without passivity. He looked like some kind of predatory animal frozen in arctic wastes, deceptively dead but ready to strike, his body locked in close, aggressive without being obvious.

And there was anger and hatred, plenty of it; all frozen solid at temperatures well below zero and wielded like a weapon.

There was a dull ache in Violet's chest – it was the fallout from yesterday (if it had been yesterday) when she had been trying to dodge the traffic on memory lane. It clouded her thinking and her judgement, kept her emotions to the fore of her mind when they should have been at the back, and weakened her defences. She struggled past vainly, trying to see beyond the bitter grey-white clouds of exhaustion and the sharp pained tang of denied tears. Violet was in no condition to face Syndrome now; she'd expended all the physical and emotional energy she had left and was suffering for it. She had given everything she had in the last week and was running so close to empty that it made no difference. His cold, clear face was a warning to her that Syndrome was going to attack in some way although he made no move at all, allowing the silence between them to stretch out to painful levels. He watched her while holding himself still with an unnatural solidity.

There was little left she could do to support herself and her mind returned to old habits like a junkie to the familiar high grounds. She felt herself _responding_ to him; she was closing herself off, tucking her emotions neatly away inside, and the cool calm feeling of absolute control returned to her like a well-worn overcoat. She schooled herself to the neutral impassivity that was her daily persona without effort; she was tired and she was worn out, but she could be as she had always been. It would not last but it _would_ give her some of her old edge.

Even through the pain in her head, rising, following the strength of her disassociation from herself.

Syndrome looked to be... _compressing_ everything inside him, perhaps, compressing it so hard that it solidified within him and had frozen his very flesh. Violet felt her own psyche mirror the reaction, feeling its effects right into the cores of her bones.

"Times have been hard," she sad at last in an emotionless voice, acknowledging Syndrome's question. His expression didn't change an inch. The hatred in his gaze intensified.

"Where will the army fly in from?" he asked softly, like the crush of fresh snow on a winter's day. Violet narrowed her eyes, suspicious, trying to work out what motivation he assumed on her part that would actually mean she answered truthfully.

"The south," she said, the lie coming to her lips easily and efficiently. Noril'sk was in the north-west. Again, Syndrome's expression stayed as still as he did.

"How soon?"

His voice was dangerous, sharp as an ice edge, and as treacherous.

"A week. It was not an aggressive mission."

Sheer guesswork on her part.

"Where will they target?"

Violet trained her mind on Zharov, and his knowledge of her situation. The hangar.

"The ventilation," she said, wondering where he was going with all this, and what information he hoped to garner.

He moved forward fast, closing the distance. She was prepared, but she was powerless to defend herself. Nikolaevsky had worn her down. Violet took one step back to gain ground and her back hit the wall. Syndrome towered over her in that instant, hands pistoning out to the wall on either side of her, trapping her. She could duck out and away but she didn't trust him not to do something... dangerous.

"You've lied to me, Parr," he whispered, voice as icy and inflectionless as a northern wind. It pried into her defences in the same way, trying to pick her apart. "That's three direct lies you've told me to my face."

Violet forced a grim smile to touch the corners of her lips and said nothing, tipping her face up to his defiantly. Dull-edged satisfaction bloomed inside her. What had he expected?

Then Syndrome smiled. It was slow and it was inhuman, cold as the taiga above, utterly ruthless, pitiless as the first arctic snows.

"Don't you understand, _Parr?_" he asked softly, voice still low, but now with a cruel edge of softness that betrayed his upper hand in the situation. His eyes locked onto hers, trying to force submission from her. "They _cannot take me_. Think back, Parr girl, just a little way. I showed you how my system operated. You figured it out yourself, in fact. Do you remember it?"

Violet's brain made the connections at the speed of pain, one hundred and seven meters a second. The huge screen she'd played about with, his numbers, his figures, his stocks, all inactive due to the time. She'd entertained the notion of disrupting them but there was a lock on the data, some kind of read-only encryption that meant there was to be no changes. The data, however, had been accurate. His influence, his power, his control, stretching out like sinuous fingers throughout the world. Every sector, though primarily technology and governments. Every area of the financial hemisphere.

She imagined him gone, then, imagined some clever little subroutine buried in his programming that would shut down his operations after a set period of time with no activity. She imagined the money being withdrawn from its homes, investments being removed and hidden away in secret accounts... financial backings for companies, corporations, countries, all gone... the money not in circulation, effects filtering down through system and reaching every single person on the planet.

"You've made yourself invaluable," she said suddenly into the darkness between them, a pressurised void of hatred and mis-spent anger. The raw, cutting expression on his face was momentarily shot through with angry surprise and he moved backwards in furious shock, giving Violet a little more breathing room. His arms dropped away from the wall and Violet felt the balance in the room shift. It wasn't even, but it had levelled out some.

Violet had figured out his plan before he had had chance to elaborate it. She could see it in his mind by closely observing the change in his features: what possessed his face for a moment was nothing so trivial as annoyance, but whatever the emotion it was certainly related. It was quickly dispersed by vicious intelligence and a calculating urgency all frozen into this statue of a man that stood a little way from her. It made him into a ticking machine, precise and puritanical, inhuman in his distance from her but possessed with an edge of malicious cruelty that only humanity could give.

Violet didn't break her gaze from Syndrome's icy eyes, seeing the tensed power in his shoulders and understanding the man's grip on the situation. He controlled her, right now, but she was on the verge of equalising that. She understood he had a bargaining chip – the world's financial security – and his next move would be to enlist her help in defending the base. She had no choice. In order to save the world she had to protect the man who had once tried to destroy it.

He was the Boss, and he had earned the title.

"You know what would happen," he said in a soft undertone, glee frozen into malicious delight.

Violet responded calmly with "You can't be taken away from it. There would be nothing left."

Syndrome dipped his head a little, not breaking eye contact. It threw his features into sharper relief, making him seem crueller and ever more corrupt. The smile edged outwards unpleasantly.

"You're not dependant on yourself, like you were before," continued Violet carefully, using a low tone. "You're not an individual. You're in everything and a part of everything and you're the skeleton of it all, whether the world knows it or not."

His smile widened just a little. "Harker was so right," he said, sounding malevolently pleased and just a little dependently righteous, secure in the karmic rightness of it all. "You were perfect. Intellectually, physically, and in terms of your powers... you would have made the experiment worthwhile."

There was an element of praise in his voice that Violet didn't miss. It was folded neatly in along with the smug self-justification, icy maliciousness and a level of unearthly hatred. She studied his features through the vague fugginess of her rising exhaustion and tried to ascertain what, exactly, he meant by that.

"Where will the army fly in from?" he asked, angry delight at what he knew would be a truthful answer staining the seemingly harmless query. Violet paused a long moment, watching Syndrome, feeling irresistibly pushed onto a single course of action. He was right.

He was so right.

* * *

_To be continued._

* * *

Rose: Many thanks! There shall be cliffhangers aplenty in future chapters. Yeah, I'm bad for that. Glad you're still liking the story!


	11. xi

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.  
_- Friedrich Nietzche_

* * *

"Where will the army fly in from?" he asked, angry delight at what he knew would be a truthful answer staining the query. Violet paused a long moment, watching Syndrome, feeling irresistibly pushed onto a single course of action. He was right.

He was so right.

"Noril'sk," she said at last, feeling the words emerge with obvious difficulty. "Their strongest base is there, in the old industrial compounds. They may come from Novosibirsk. The most likely tactical position is from the north-west, off your frequencies."

"How soon?"

"I don't know. Any time now."

"Where will they target?"

"Your obvious weaknesses. Exposed spots, vulnerable hangars, the area above your base room."

Syndrome raised his head and stood tall, dominating the room with his presence. He knew he'd won. "Many thanks," he said, with more than a touch of sarcasm. With a mocking bow, he turned to leave.

There was a feeling trying to batter its way through Violet's defences, a low disheartenment and a slow draining of morale mixed in with guilt. She kept it at bay with one hand, still trying to think her way from the situation. She had had _no choice_. He was right; he was too powerful to be controlled, too influential to be defeated – he held governments together, international corporations, single-handedly. Taking him in would destroy the world's economy, everything.

_Like he destroyed me._

The anger that filled Violet was flat and caustic, a chemical by-product of the rage in her suppressed almost to death.

"Tell me about Mr. Incredible."

Her voice was deliberately low and tinged with just a touch of casual cruelty. It carried well in the empty room. The only things that filled the space were a single bunk, a small table and a chair, and they were all pushed to one side of the space. Sound bounced easily from harsh wall corners and redoubled its efforts, seeming to strike Syndrome a physical blow.

Violet was aware it had been a low blow and outright dangerous move. The strength of his venom and anger (shot through with desperation and panic) had been enough to show her the depth of his feelings on the matter. The blindness of his rage and the unseeing look his eyes all added up to a wound of great depth and magnitude, and she had just poked it.

But she was _right_. She knew it. And he had no right to be enraged at her for attacking his weak spot; he had spent the last two days doing exactly the same thing. He had manipulated her, goaded her, used her until she thought she had nothing left to be used for. He had ripped the stitches from wounds without a care, left her to bleed over things best long forgotten, and she had _suffered_. Again and again, over and over, more than she needed to, everything she had ever defended herself against.

Syndrome stopped immediately, his back to her. Violet stood some way from him, still aware of her position with her back to the wall. It was not a good defensive position. There was no room to move.

Syndrome turned slowly, but moving with the power and weight of magma flow. The rage that swam over his skin was undefinable, heavy like mercury, unstoppable. It set his eyes blazing and twisted his mouth into an ugly shape that seemed to rent the air with its unnecessary fury.

Violet remembered how she had felt when he had first mentioned Harker, and knew a thin thread of fear. She had pushed him further than anyone had before now and all predictions were void. It would not be beyond him to kill her.

"You will not speak of him," he said in a deadly, low voice, carried like the predator's growl it was. Violet reacted by throwing her shoulders forward and allowing the sheer fury in her to build up.

"Why not?" she growled, in a voice like black velvet.

There was a sudden cracking sensation in her head and she realised that Syndrome had leapt forward, grabbing her harshly by the arms and slamming her into the wall. His body was a clenched fist of tension, unbalanced and psychotic, and his eyes were crazy.

"_You will not speak of him!_" he hissed, pain disguised as madness spinning in his pupils.

"You spoke of Harker," she said, and there was so much quiet maliciousness in her voice that Syndrome's machinelike grip on her arms eased for a moment. "You spoke of him when you shouldn't have. You created him, gave him freedom. You suffered at the hands of a super, and then you passed that on to other people. I was one of them. _Do not shirk the responsibility you hold for him._"

The rage exploded in her in a curiously orderly fashion, unfolding, spreading outwards, blinding her by tunnelling in her vision. Her own hands flashed up to grip Syndrome's broader biceps and she pushed forward suddenly. He was not expecting such a direct attack and she managed to catch him off-guard, swinging him round to reverse their positions. She slammed him feverishly against the wall and then released his inner elbows from her grip. For a moment, Violet was instantly aware of how her scars were on display, broadcast loud and wide for Syndrome to see. She fought the urge to cross her arms over her chest to hide the marks of what he had managed to do. A similar thought appeared to cross Syndrome's mind.

"I repaid you back in full for what you did to me," he said, a half-snarl in his voice, backed up but still on the offensive. "You suffered and I'm glad. _I'm glad!_"

He shouted those last words. Violet reassessed the situation, carefully observing the growing look of derangement on the man's face. She had a sudden half-image of a blood-spattered girl, psychosis in her eyes and heart saying _you always took care of me_, and understood she had to tread carefully. Knowing it was one thing, however. There was anger in her now, and fear, and anger at the fear. Memories of Harker were still close to the fore of her mind – especially of the ordeal that she had undergone mere hours before. There were still the echoes of screams in her head, painfully close. It was taking most of her will to keep them from flooding back, especially given the link between Harker and the man uncomfortably close to her now. The more she pushed back Harker, the more the pain bloomed. And it was evident Syndrome had discovered the link.

"You were screaming last night," he said slowly, maliciously. "You were screaming of him. You went somewhere else! Look at you. _Look at what he made of you._You're weak. You're defenceless, behind the iron wall you put up. But how much effort did it take to get it down? A couple of nice words and some water. That was it._You should have died because you're not living now._ Even thinking of Harker causes you pain. _Look at yourself,_" he continued, gleeful threat colouring his words. He raised a hand to her face but didn't touch her, as though he couldn't bring himself to make a connection with someone so directly related to his antagonist. "You've repressed it all so much that it actually causes you _pain_. You're a wreck. You're a _mess_. And you are not worth what you have made yourself out to be."

Harker. The name conjured up images stained red.

"I will not think of him," she said rhythmically, bouncing her words to the beat in her skull, and she found strength in them. Calm descended, numb cold, precision, the key to everything. A shield, a barrier, a strengthened fortress keeping feelings away and emotions safely contained in the nuclear power plant of her focus.

Syndrome laughed then, a crazy grimace that caused the hairs on her arms to stand up. "Good," he said through the mania. "Then I'll have done something right out of you."

The calm vanished, snapped away like it had never held sway in her thoughts. Thin guards in her mind were furiously fighting the anger down, with limited success – they were merely slowing it, allowing it to build momentum. There was beauty in this moment, a wonderful balancing of ironies that buoyed the situation and kept it stable. It was a perfect prism of a moment through which their emotions split and shimmered, a fantastic array of reds and blacks and whites.

Through this, Violet saw Syndrome's own humanity laid out before him, and that brought a burning-cold clinical coolness back to her. Syndrome was weak, and she had recognised this only minutes before. It was a hole in his character, a flaw he wore for all to see, and as a result people tended to look over it. He had suffered (in his own way) at the hands of her father, a man he had chosen to respect and adore.

The concequences were easily traced and Violet remembered the parallels that had brought her to this conclusion in the first place. He had been rejected, harshly, by the man he had placed upon a pedestal and looked to for everything. It had created a new person in the stead of the old one – his Syndrome to Violet's Thirty-Four. Syndrome had reacted the only way he knew how, the only way a child could possibly percieve it – he decided to remove the problem, the whole problem, and everything would be all better. He had taken his curiosity with the supers and turned it into a casual, interested scientific nihilism.

The records were plain to see on this one. He'd cut a swathe through the ranks of the ex-NSA members and left nothing but bodies and comfortably mild regrets behind him. Oh dear, what a shame, I didn't want to kill them, but _he_ made me. What a pity.

Violet realised, with a jolt, that she could not count herself innocent of this action either. She had done the same despite how she tried to justify it through the severity of her sufferance. Syndrome had never _bled_, he had never screamed until his vocal cords tore, had never seen his life running red into the gutter. She had abandoned her morals and her principles of life sacrosanct, turned upon those that she recognised as the villain and slaughtered them without pause. Dicker had mentioned it once, in passing – "Tone down a little, we need to prosecute some of them _alive_." Harker had been her world, her entire reason for being, and when that was gone she had taken the image of the archetypal 'badguy' and repeated the act over and over.

Though, perhaps, in her case it had been justification – searching for something to confirm what she had done, that she had made the right choice in regards to Harker, so it was okay to make that choice again for _these_ villains. Syndrome had never achieved _his_ goal. Did that make his behaviour the same as hers? Was he searching for confirmation of his actions, or simply practising?

There was rage in her at this realisation, an anger at the way the parallel between herself and her tormentor trivialised her own experiences. Syndrome had been rejected, but not actively harmed by the man he had worshipped. Violet had clinically died, twice, under the custody of the man she loved, and their reactions had been the same. Violet recognised that childhood trauma often stayed within a person for years and years, often driving every motivation they had, but millions of others had taken rejection like Syndrome had and yet _totally failed_ to go on a homicidal killing-spree. Violet had been driven to her limits and over that fragile edge, and her resulting behaviour was a product of the psychosis produced.

She realised she had become defensive, excusing her own actions in the face of Syndrome's, and reminded herself that _she_ was a member of a recognised law-enforcement body with the legal right to decide if a villain should be taken in dead or alive. _He_ was a sociopath with a vendetta.

Something inside her, a deep-buried relic of her old morals, asked her what the difference was.

_Oh God, I need someone to help me,_ she thought with a distant desperation. It was the first time such a thought had passed her mind in five years.

But she was still angry; furious, in fact. Sydrome might have been hurt and had suffered in his own way but it was _not enough_ – for what he had done, the measures he had gone to, the way he had tried to hurt her father and those that belonged to him as he belonged to them. He had willingly given money to a man who had _(hurt her so bad)_ the active intention of torturing someone. He had been hurt in the past and it had influenced his choices, this was true, but at what point had this given him the right to play with people's lives as if they were his personal property? To treat the world like his own, personalised chequers board?

"Look at me," she hissed. "_Look at me. _Look at what Harker made of me. The scars, the change in me... I am a different person. I died with Harker. I am not who I was, and I never will be. _YOU FUNCTION!_" she shouted suddenly, aware of how long it had been since she had raised her voice, not being able to control it. It was a glorious upsurging that stretched her throat to a wonderful burning point. "You _function!_ You took your wounds and licked them clean and turned to your money, because it worked for you! _Look at what he made me!_ I can't function, I can't work right because he removed everything in me that was human! I can't feel properly! Don't you get it? I can't feel right _at all!_ Every day I'm the same, and the only thing I feel is regret because _I KILLED HIM!_ You're lucky, the one you adored is still alive. Do you have _any idea_ what it's like to know you killed him? That he's dead because of _you?_ It killed me." She paused to breathe in harsh gasps, eyes locked firmly onto Syndrome's. She was too far gone to register what emotion he might have been feeling, if any. "_Damn_ you! You created a new person for yourself, who you wanted to be, and I'm stuck with who I am now! Why can't you _see_–"

"_I SEE EVERYTHING!_" he roared suddenly, grabbing her lower biceps in a painfully tight grip. His fingers curled right around her arms and met each other at the fingertips. "_How lucky you were, to have him so close to you! You had everything! You lost the man you looked up to but_ I've _had to watch him care for someone else!_"

Everything in Violet went dead in that moment. Her mind went totally flat; her words deserted her. There were no messages trying to reach her nerves from her brain, nothing. She'd told him, and he hadn't seemed to understand.

"I killed him," she said, and her voice was as cold as the grave and as darkly expressionless. "Every day I want to bring him back, every day I want to tell him that he promised to look after me. Mr. Incredible is still alive. Do you realise how lucky you are not to have to regret killing him?"

Her voice had grown progressively quieter and had lost none of its lifeless quality. Syndrome's expression was one of bitter rage, his hands still biting harshly into her arms.

"Look at me," said Violet again, and there was so little expression in her that Sydrome didn't react. "I said, _look at me_. Look at what has become of me," she added in a lower tone, but still with furious venom. She saw his eyes dart across his shoulders, registering how her flesh pulled and rippled between the corrupted lines of skin. Violet closed her eyes and shuddered briefly, almost violently, something Syndrome could not have missed. When she raised her head again his gaze was locked onto hers once more, mouth still in that same deathly grim line.

"Do you know what it's like to truly regret killing someone? To feel so bad for it that no amount of justification makes it go away? He would have killed me. He would have loved me to death, and I would have gone with him. I want him back but, even if it were possible, I wouldn't be able to do it. You're lucky. The man you hate is still alive. You can't regret killing him, for all the adoration you bestowed upon him. He's alive for you to hate him, and I wish, oh God I wish the same were true for me."

There seemed to be nothing left to shout.

"You function, and you count yourself unlucky for it. You're managed to keep most of it away from yourself, made easier by how you've grown and changed and made worlds of yourself. This is all I have been for four years, and it's all I ever will be."

Violet took a step back, eyes staring through his shirt as though she could see out the other side. Memories of Harker surged, remembrances shot through with miserable loss, and her limp hands at her sides felt heavy and overweighted with blood. She fancied her fingers were slippery with it, and failed to repress another light shudder.

"I didn't mean for him to die but I did anyway, and I miss him, oh God I miss him," she said simply, and turned away.

--I--

The Boss kept his back to the wall, feeling the blood return to the spots on his arms where Parr's fingers had dug in so deep that it had cut off the circulation. Her back was to him, hands limply at her sides, and a large part of his brain was screaming _kill her now, you could take her easily, break her neck and you're one step closer to it being all better!_

The rage had faded some, a sense of reality slapped back as her words penetrated the hard-cased coating of black hatred about his mind. The ones that struck the most clearly were _any time now_. But his pride had taken a nasty hit, a particularly harsh blow from this slip of a girl who prized her own sense of self so highly that she considered herself irredeemable.

He'd never seen her bare back before, even though it was partially blocked by the black of her halter top that stretched over her shoulders and around her ribcage. What skin he could see, though, under her neck and from the small of her back upwards, was a clawed mess of scar tissue. There was no pattern to it at all, and no ugliness, either. Whatever healing abilities her powers bestowed upon her had limited the damage, culled its extensiveness, but the scars were still long and broad and deep and jagged. They were cruel and without reason, their silveriness at odds with their brutality. She must have bled dearly.

The scars made the connections in his mind: scars, Harker, research, supers, _Mr. Incredible_. He processed what she had said, what she had told him about the difference between betrayal and pain, and to his amazement, the anger rose again.

Was she saying that she hurt more than he did? Was she _trivialising_ what had effectively changed his life's course, what had turned him into who he was today, what made him battle with feelings of self-loathing and crippling self-doubt every day? What had turned him into _this?_

"You knew what you did was right," he said, sheer incredulity riding his words like an afterthought of the anger. "People understand what you did, why you had to do it. I could never even get _close_ to justifying myself! I just wanted it so badly that it _twisted_ me, turned me into this! And I _couldn't do it!_ Do you know what it's like to understand what is needed to cure you, and yet never being able to reach it?"

Parr's fists had clenched, and there were muscles standing out on the backs of her forearms. "Yes," she said, as though through gritted teeth. "But he can't come back."

"Then you're _fine!_" he roared, surprising himself with the ferocity of it, stunned as though by a compression wave. "Move _on! _Get _better!_ Your problem is sorted, done with! Why do you let it affect you?" He laughed humourlessly, and noted distantly that there was a less-than-sane edge to it. "Your problem isn't still walking the world, mocking you at every turn! _You can move on!_"

She turned then and there was deep-set malice in her eyes, overflowing and filing her eyes dark. Fury made her mouth twist and the scar on her face bunch oddly on her cheek. The tendons in her throat stood out, too-pale skin tracing the buried veins beneath them.

"Oh, my problem's still here," she said softly, just this side of homicidal. "It all links back to you, doesn't it? _You_ chose this, all of it. _You_ set it in motion. You could have chosen to forget Mr. Incredible, brush casual rejection off like everyone else does, to be superior to the man. You held onto it, clutching your grudge and what you thought was your precious integrity like a teddy bear. _Take responsibility_. You started this. You killed me. I would have never met Harker if it weren't for you and _I hate you for that!_ I had to destroy the only man I've ever loved because of you and your 'research'. I told you, _you function_. Can you honestly say that of _me?_"

The Boss remembered something then, a conversation held a few days ago... _'She's dead inside... it's like she's not there any more. And she was pretty vacant to begin with...'_

No. No he couldn't, and it made him all the angrier. It wasn't _fair_ that she should be affected so strongly. He was struggling to communicate it to her, how much he had been hurt, why she should take it seriously. Could she not see it?

_No_, he thought, bitterness and childishness swamping any rational thought. _Look at her, she's fine. She's so _self-obsessed... _like the rest of her family..._

Ah... a vulnerability.

"Why are you angry with me for that?" he asked, using the weakness, homing in, lowering his voice until it was gentle and curious. He saw her eyes narrow and he understood that she knew he was on the attack but hadn't yet figured out how. "True... all this did lead to you, and what you perceive as 'affecting' you, but... I've done horrible things. I tried to kill your father, I tried to kill your mother and brother. I even tried to kidnap your baby brother! All those things and more! So why is it you're angry with me for Harker, and not for those other things?"

Her lips parted for a moment, but she had nothing to say. He regarded her with a single raised eyebrow, fierce in his triumph.

--I--

Thoughts went through Violet's mind too fast for her to catalogue them. He'd gotten it wrong. _Again_. What did she need to say to make him understand?

Frowning, and in a voice of abject puzzlement, she said, "That's not my problem."

His face went from smirk to incredulity in seconds, and was then usurped by a callous sneer. His stance was that of a man on the moral high ground despite the fact that he was still backed against the wall.

"You don't care about your family? How... _thoughtful_."

"I care about them," she said, voice still light with puzzlement and heavy with impending exasperation. "I do. I pushed them away so I couldn't hurt them, because whenever they looked at me... I could see how it affected them." The hurt eyes, the carefully cheerful faces, Vi, honey, you must be boiling, wearing a sweater in this heat! Why won't you take it off? Okay, have it your way... "You were my dad's problem. He caused it, and he tried to solve it. I... was a distraction, and so were my siblings. We were something else to contend with, for you. It was only ever about the super you wanted to destroy. It was _personal_ to you." The P-word again, the one that made him flinch without him ever being aware of it. "I was angry. For a long time. Then I put it down as something to be left behind. It was never about me or my brothers. That was enough."

Violet stopped, letting the feeling inside her build, using its energy to add motion to her words. It moved out of her defences in a carefully-channelled stream, flashing dark across her face, deepening her eyes.

"But now, _Syndrome_, it's become personal. You did this to me. _You_. You did it and _I hate you for it_. You made me kill him."

Her fists were clenched and her rage at a low enough level to be used. The rest of it was blocked up behind her self-control, walls strong with practise. Not feeling anything was a habit to her – one that came now like breathing. Finally she had focus and plenty of tight control. Anger had leant her that.

Syndrome's expression was still as shallowly angry as it had been before, wrathful and resentful. Unless she was mistaken, it was tinged with the faintest edge of desperation too. He hadn't understood. What could she do to _make_ him understand?

She could be cruel, Violet realised. She could show him the cruelty she had suffered, she could make him understand the regret and the crippling remorse and why all it took was a single touch.

"You haven't told me about Mr. Incredible," she said, forcing her voice into gentler tones, throwing softness in like cloud shapes. It was surprisingly easy to keep the anger at bay, to try to reach him on another level, and it felt so powerful. "But I'm not going to ask you again. It hurts you, I know."

She moved forwards and concentrated on a picture of Harker, trying to keep it clinical, focusing on where it hurt most inside of herself. Syndrome's eyes were confused and choleric, pulled up short by the new tone in her voice. There was still rage, hatred and vicious displeasure there, all uneasily occupying his features.

Violet carefully raised a hand, making it clear that it was not an aggressive move, and placed it flat in the very middle of his chest. She could feel the impatient heartbeat under her palm and was once again shocked by how human he was. He was such a monster in her mind that she kept forgetting.

_Don't trust what your mind tells you_, she thought. _It's lied too often before. Go on instinct here. His body language will tell you the rest._

And indeed, he had the look of a cornered animal preparing to fight. Violet relaxed her shoulders as much as she could, pulling thick ropes of tension from her body. It was worth it. This might hurt him enough to show him what she meant.

"It hurts here," she told him quietly, gently, not moving her hand, pressing a little harder though the warm cloth so that he would register the touch. His heartbeat became shallower. Violet took her hand away and moved a little closer in while carefully watching her level of proximity, trying to keep a clear head. She was physically vulnerable like this and his clear view of her scars made her nervous. She locked it away by focusing on the task at hand, and pressed her palm firmly against the middle of his stomach.

Violet felt him jump under her fingers and she looked up again to catch his eyes. They were angry and fearful. His fists were clenching by his sides, arms locked rigid, nervous tendons standing out from his forearms. "It hurts here too," she told him, knowing she'd gotten it right when defensiveness filled his stance. The heart and the stomach, the two places she felt Harker's loss most keenly. And one other place, one less obvious.

She placed both hands on his shoulders, reaching up some way to do it, and exerted gentle downward pressure. To her surprise he dropped to his knees slowly and smoothly, following the tension of her hands. He didn't seem aware that he was doing it, face showing his lack of understanding, rage draining away like quicksilver to be replaced with semi-panicked fearfulness. Violet dropped down to one knee, knowing how important it was the she didn't kneel with him and didn't make it look like they were on equal footing. She had to give the impression that she was still in control, still looking down at him slightly.

Then she took his head in both hands, feeling the line of his cheekbones under each thumb. It was... strange, to be on this side of the power divide. Exhilarating. Potent. There was a curious sense of omnipotence and of total control despite Syndrome's obvious physical advantage.

_How can being so gentle feel so cruel?_ she wondered, watching with curiosity to the way Syndrome reacted to her hands on him. His eyes closed, his head tipped forward, and it was if he were giving her silent permission to continue. Judging by the faint look of suffering on his features, it was if he were telling her not to stop.

Gently, experimentally, she brushed a hand slowly through his hair. As she smoothed it back from his temples his breath hitched a moment, a shiver passed through him and his head fell forward a little more, hiding his face from her. Never had anyone appeared so vulnerable to her. Ever.

_Is it because you know how much you hold them in your hand? Is it because you know how much power you have, and how easy it would be to abuse that, to manipulate them through it?_

Wasn't that what she was planning to do now?

More importantly, wasn't it necessary?

Syndrome underestimated the cruelty that came packaged in with gentleness. He had used it against her in his quest for information and had tirelessly wound up her nerves until they had rather demonstrably let go. It was time to show him what damage such consideration could inflict.

"I understand this. You know I do. I _understand_ you." Yes, she'd figured him out and she would use it to her advantage. She knew why it would hurt him, had figured it out in that split second before Nikolaevsky had walked in. It had all been so clear.

She raised his head in her hands until he was looking at her. His blue eyes were hopelessly angry now, swamped over by what he retained as pain and the clear tide of unfortunately-remembered memories, looking at her as if she held the key to his long-term prison cell. His skin was burning warm beneath her fingers in a plain metabolic heat stretched taught over the bone, and Violet realised he had lost more weight than she had originally estimated.

"It hurts you because you don't love him any more, and you still think you should. You know that he's beneath you, and you have no respect for him, but part of you will always be looking to him for approval. Right?"

_I'm always looking for Harker, _to _Harker. The only difference is I know that I failed him so badly he died._

Was there the tiniest measure of trust in his eyes, mixed in with the childish hurt and resentment? She thought so. It was time to give him the last push.

Violet leaned in and rested her forehead against his, still holding the sides of his head in her hands. There was thin pulse beneath one of her fingers, sending out slow-shallow beats that she recognised as the harbinger of misery. His breathing was ragged, uncertain, hopelessly held. Violet moved a hand to brush back the hair from his forehead, allowing it to follow the curve of his skull until it cupped his jaw.

"I _understand_," she whispered. "I know about the hate and the pain and the fury and the sacrifice. I do. I know why you did it all, and how much you still hurt for him because you can never show him what you achieved."

Violet raised her own head then and pressed a simple, chaste kiss against his forehead. He shuddered beneath her and his hands suddenly flashed up to grasp her upper arms, fingers desperately digging into at the sparse flesh and trying to find ply in the muscle. His grip was desperate and demanding, the grasp of a man not touched in genuine compassion for some years, of a man who had resigned himself years ago to being alone in the ache that he bore.

"It hurts here too," she whispered, lips moving against the skin of his forehead, thumbs brushing the sides of his temples. Another shiver passed through him then, this one more violent, and the hands about her biceps curled in tighter. It was as if he were trying to pull her into himself, or possibly wrap her around him.

_Stay clinical,_ she reminded herself, but it was hard going. It was too easy to see herself in the shaken man before her, brought down with little more than a gentle touch and some kind words. To bring herself back to dispassion she remembered why she hated Syndrome and how his obsession had landed them all in this position in the first place. Despite his indelicacies, Violet still had to tread carefully. The more vulnerable he became, the more aware he would be of his lack of defences, and there was always the risk of a violent reaction. She needed him, still, to get out of here. She would never walk from this place without his authorisation. She needed to make him understand why she was as she was.

What could she say to him that would strike him on a deeply personal level? Where were his insecurities? What values might he have felt angry at himself for forsaking? What part of his vulnerable psyche could she twist?

Violet raised Syndrome's head again, tipping his face upwards toward hers. Their gaze met and surged communication, wordless understanding.

"You are not a monster," she told him in a voice barely above a whisper, and pressed her lips to his.

It was fleeting, chaste, a brief press of lip-to-lip. It was their third kiss, a remarkable feat for two people who had sworn such hatred to each other mere moments ago. For Violet, it was not about comfort this time, or his presence. It was just another way of controlling him. Just this once.

She drew away after two or three seconds, brushing a thumb lightly over the ridge of his cheekbone. There was something close in the situation. It may have been because she had been vulnerable often enough to him, but never the other way around.

Violet stood up then, breaking the gentle flow of movements she had been using, and strode away to another part of the room, being careful to keep good clear distance between them. She kept her back to him and her arms folded harshly across her stomach. They stayed like that for what could easily have been a minute, every second tweaking the clockwork of Violet's anxiety a little tighter.

Some animals, when injured, lash out. They fight back because it's all they know how to do. Violet had a feeling that this could be a similar case, and leaving her back exposed to Syndrome felt like an extremely risky move.

There was silence between them and in the tense space she heard the movements that were Syndrome rising to his feet. She set her jaw, refocused her eyes to be sharper and more dangerous, and waited for him to say something.

* * *

_To be continued._

* * *

**Rose:** Thanks! More chapters to come.


	12. xii

Guess what? It's my birthday today. So have a slightly-longer-than-normal post to celebrate.

* * *

Emotions still welled up within her, but they were all noise – curving lines stretching in sinewy paths in her mind that would never connect.  
_- 'fadedpearl'_

* * *

Syndrome brushed his knuckles over his mouth almost unconsciously, not taking his eyes from Parr's back, and then stopped mid-motion as he realised he'd called himself 'Syndrome'.

_Damnit._

He'd broken himself of the habit by the simple expedient of losing to the Incredibles – the name was associated with months of immobile pain and slow, excruciating recovery. And Parr had – she had –

She had brought it all back with little more than a whisper and a touch.

It had been unexpected, to say the least. Parr's eyes had cleared somewhat, as though she were viewing him properly for the first time. There was something softly dispassionate about her in that moment, as though she were looking at him as a stranger that she pitied, and not as the man she had professed so vehemently to hate.

Then she had asked again, still a little taught about the shoulders, about Mr. Incredible. Syndrome had prepared himself for some kind of comeback, but she'd beaten him to it with one simple comment.

'_It hurts you, I know.'_

Whatever he had been planning to say – whatever he _could_ have said – was rudely interrupted when the communications line between his brain and his mouth abruptly went dead. Most of the nerve system of his body seemed to shut down, in fact. There was a heavy, dead sensation at the crux of his ribs, a lead weight trying to collapse his internal organs, and a sickness in the bottom of his gut. That was it. She had officially pushed it _too far._ He was going to start hurting her soon, and he wasn't sure when he would be able to stop.

By the time this had occurred to him she had closed this distance with wary steps and pressed a small, cold hand into the centre of his chest. _Of course she's cold, _he thought disjointedly and maniacally. _It's not like she's wearing much._

Parr's sheer audacity froze him into immobility. There wasn't rage in him, as such, just a thick sheet of paralysing incredulity layered over the ice-cold malevolence that hadn't quite reached the fore yet. And yet...

Everything about her body language, including her slow and deliberately heavy-handed movements, showed her intentions to be anything but hostile. She was doing something else here, slowly and cautiously, and his suspicions rose again when the hand on his chest exerted a little more pressure.

He darted his eyes back up to Parr's and was shocked at what he saw, incredulity nulling the rising rage. Her eyes were kind and thoughtful, accepting, regretful. Any tension in her body was gone, still and loose.

'_It hurts here',_ she told him, and he felt her fingers flex ever-so-slightly over that cauldron of anger and malicious death settled in his solar plexus. She was right. It did hurt. It was fury and pain and betrayal and years of trying to fight that, and the pH of the mix had eaten away his insides and his heart until he wasn't sure what was left.

Parr moved her hand down to rest over the sickly sensation riding his gut. He jumped; it was a sensitive, vulnerable spot. She could have hurt him so badly if she had chosen to.

'_It hurts here, too,' _said the girl, and Syndrome found his anger draining. It wasn't leaving him; it was being frightened away. Parr was looking into him, _through_ him, in far too personal a manner and a tingling fear was shivering its way up through his synapses. What was she doing? What did she honestly hope to achieve by this? He was strong, he was the Boss, he was not be messed with or manipulated so well...

... and yet, he found that he was struggling to move. There was tight band of pressure around his chest which began the steady process of catalysing fear into panic.

The problem must have been in his brain, nerves and the communication system therein, because his muscles and joints seemed to be able to operate wonderfully. He barely noticed when Parr pushed him downwards, following the motion to kneel a little above him. The fear-panic conversion rate increased.

Her felt it when she gently took his face though, oh, he felt it. Her eyes scanned his face with a detachment filled with curiosity, seemingly unaware of how every hair on his neck and arms seemed to be trying to stand on end. His breath came out in a silent gasp, shaky and unsound, and his head tipped forward in a desperate attempt to get more of that touch. It was light and cool, true, but it was contact. Real contact, accompanied by the sensation that his brain was full of icicles.

When she brushed her fingers through his hair, he shivered. He couldn't have stopped himself for anything in the world. There was nothing more he could have said to describe how it felt. It was everything to him.

And it hurt. It all hurt.

She said something else but Syndrome didn't listen to the words. He just listened to the sounds made, the way she spoke, the gentleness and compassion at odds with her detached expression, the unfamiliarity of such close inflections.

Violet raised his head to meet her eyes, gentle pressure on his jaw bringing his face up toward hers. Her eyes were tired and purple, airless and suitably broken. There was pity twined with compassion, a touch of condescending understanding and a shared pain, and she spoke again. She was right. She _did_ understand.

Violet moved even closer then, bringing their foreheads into light contact. Syndrome swallowed and closed his eyes, feeling for the first time in years the sense of someone welcomed into his personal space. Her voice sounded again, low and close, and then she touched her lips to his forehead.

A shudder wracked its way through him then and his arms moved upward, hands desperately digging into her arms, keeping her near to him. Shared warmth, contact, a closeness. They was a ferocity in his grip that frightened him. He was scared that if squeezed any tighter then she'd shatter into a million pieces, and he could not think of anything worse that could possibly happen. Her lips moved against the skin over his skull, seeming like an impossible level of separation. She was speaking the words right into his brain, not into the flesh, the blood or the bone covering it.

He thought he was saying _don't leave, stay like this, please,_ but it must have been all in his head as she didn't respond.

Her hand moved from his head until the were fingers under his chin, keeping his face turned toward hers. Violet had not broken gaze with him.

_'You are not a monster,'_ she said with great levels of solemnity, and he wasn't really sure what to think of that.

She pressed her lips to his for just several seconds that lasted less than a moment, a conclusion to seal the covenant of understanding between them. She brushed her thumb over the line of his cheekbone, mirroring the line hewn by her own scar. It was like a thumbprint to mark ownership, he thought in some wordless and primal way. It as if she was saying _yes, I get it, and you're part of that too._

_You feel as though you'll drown in the darkness, drown in the blood, and drown willingly._

Abruptly, she'd stood and shattered it all. Gone was the closeness, the joining of understanding and the warmth, what little she had. She stood some distance away, back to him, arms folded across her stomach. Her scars shone under the light, a paradoxical silver glow against the faint flesh tones of her skin.

There was something under his skin, trying to get out. It bubbled and boiled, black and sticky, crawling through his flesh and making his fingertips tingle. He took a step forwards.

"And?" he said softly. Parr made no response. He took another step, and another, bringing himself nearer to the prone figure.

"Well?" he demanded then, gruff harshness forced into his voice. "What now?"

She still said nothing. That _thing_ crawling through his veins made another spirited attempt to escape its prison, surging against his skin until he thought he would explode. Syndrome recognised it as furious, wounded rage.

He lunged forward and grabbed her arm in a cruel grip, spinning her around to face him.

Parr looked up at him with eyes so dead they should have been buried months ago. Her face was flat and expressionless, icy-cold heartlessness having frozen her very skin. She was completely different from mere moments ago, when she had been warm, caring, comfort embodied. This was... a different being, a different person, a different mode of existence. The warmness in her had wisped away into the harsh arctic winter that seemed to blow about her bones.

Syndrome realised he'd taken a step back and had let go of her arm. On her biceps, white fingermarks faded away.

"Do you see?" she said. Her voice, dead and toneless, made it more of a statement than a question. It was the voice of the psychopath on the last step to the edge of the mental catastrophe curve. "This is what he did to me every day. Every day, without fail. And you did it to me, too. Trying to forget about it causes me pain. Actual pain. Migraines. _How do you expect me to act like you predict if I'm in so many pieces I don't know where to start looking?_"

It wasn't what she said that finally hammered the point home to him, it was her eyes. When muscle breaks, it mends, knits itself, heals harder and becomes tougher. What, he found himself wondering, if that process happened over and over? Every day, in fact? Common biology dictated exhaustion and irreparability of the tissues, but suddenly he thought that that wasn't the end of the process. It was this completely dead look, harder than diamond and with a much more vicious edge.

She was so shattered there was no clear way to put her back together again.

They stood there like that for several highly-charged seconds, a stalemate between his furious, selfish, wounded rage and her corpse aggression. The moment was broken rather efficiently by the sound of the door slamming back.

Neither looked around as Nikolaevsky burst in, both trying to force their point across by sheer force of will, but the Russian's words were enough to break the deadlock.

"They're here. And they're communicating."

A delicate smile took ahold of the bottom half of the Boss' face, a fragile movement in unfamiliar territory, though his eyes remained the same.

"You're going to have to help me, Parr."

It wasn't a request. It was a statement.

"I know," she said in an emotionless voice that was nevertheless charged with more sheer anger than was feasible. Nikolaevsky, breathing heavily from his run, darted his eyes between the two still figures anxiously. There was another moment of motionlessness, before the Boss smiled again and straightened up from hs barely-perceptible predatory crouch.

"Well?" he said mockingly, seeming to thoroughly enjoy the girl's disadvantage in the situation. He extended a hand toward the door. "After you."

Her eyes tracking him for just a moment, she moved away from the Boss and toward Nikolaevsky. Over the girl's shoulder, he saw the Boss nod slightly and so let her pass through the door.

"Boss?" he asked quietly, wary of disturbing the air in the room. It was filled with so much hatred that he was afraid of attracting its attention lest it devour him alive.

"She'll help," his Boss said, in a grim tone infused with malicious delight. "She doesn't have a choice."

"Boss?" said Nikolaevsky again, drawing away a little. The Boss turned to look at him properly, and for the first time Nikolaevsky was truly frightened of the man.

"Yes?"

"Boss, you look..." There was no adequate English word to describe it, so he settled with "... crazy."

There was puzzlement for a moment, and then the strange cruelty left his Boss' face. Nikolaevsky welcomed the change.

The Boss took a deep breath and appeared to focus. "You said they're here? Have you locked the base down?"

Nikolaevsky felt insulted. "Ten minutes before they arrived. Place is deadbolted on every level, all the blast doors. There's no _way_ they're getting through all the titanium reinforcements."

"They're communicating?"

"And willing to negotiate."

"Negotiate? They're faster than I gave them credit for. I'd assumed a military strike would have come first..."

"So had I, sir. The base is on alert. I think that... the girl passed on some financial information to her accomplice, and they used that to work out your influence. They were cautious. Very."

The Boss' face was becoming more familiar terrain, Nikolaevsky was relieved to note. He was able to read the emotional weather once more, and _this_ look was one of involved calculation.

"That's not typical government procedure, Russian or American. I'll wager Special Agent Rick Dicker's personally involved in this... which will be to our immense advantage."

There was a smile on the Boss' face now, but it hung a little crooked, as though it didn't fit right just yet. His eyes gazed off into the middle distance while tracing a couple of fingers over the side of his mouth. Nikolaevsky didn't even bother to ask after the Boss' question.

"They want her back alive and well," continued the Boss thoughtfully. "That's a good bargaining chip for us, especially as she'll have to vouch for the operations here. She understands the need for stability..."

There seemed to be more to that statement than Nikolaevsky was prepared to read into, and time was of the essence.

"They want to speak to you, Boss. Now."

"Video link?"

"Yeah."

The Boss' vision clicked abruptly back to the present time and he cast a quick glance at Nikolaevsky's face.

"Set it up, commander."

"_Video?_ You're going to allow them to see you?"

"That soldier who infiltrated the base has seen me already. There's not much damage left to be dealt..."

Nikolaevsky cast a doubtful gaze at his Boss, making sure the man knew of his concerns. The Boss, that genius of perception, picked up his commander's thoughts immediately. He nodded to show he had acknowledged them.

"Let's go," he said, and Nikolaevsky was relieved to see that his boss looked more normal than he had for twenty-four hours. The girl... she was the problem, the root of all this changing, despite the Boss' declaration of her understanding of stability. She was standing just beyond the doorway and staring down the length of the corridor. Her expression was cold and dead; the face, perhaps, of a suicide looking back. Nikolaevsky stood beside her, wary, whilst the Boss followed him from the room.

"Shall we?" said the Boss pleasantly, and they started to move.

--I--

The HQ room was holding only the bare necessities today, as though it was wartime and Syndrome was preserving resources. Violet supposed that, in a way, he was.

The big room's lighting was minimal at best, throwing dark shadows along the floor and into the corners made between walls, desks and chairs. It was as though darkness was inexorably drawing into their little pool of light, moving in only when not looked at directly. Violet's mental state was doing something very similar. She felt easy with it all.

She was leaning against a wall with her bare arms folded across her exposed stomach. Nikolaevsky was standing scant inches from one of her arms, gun drawn but with the safety on. He wasn't taking chances, in any sense. Another guard stood on her other side, long-barrelled rifle held in a loose grip that could nevertheless be tightened in an instant. She had noticed the captain's stripes on the man's right shoulder and breastplate: this man was one step lower on Syndrome's hierarchical guard structure than Nikolaevsky. He was not to be messed with. Nikolaevsky had evidently seen fit to post a captain to keep her in check as well as himself, which spoke volumes of the higher ranks' training and his caution for Violet herself.

In fact, now that she came to think about it, most of the soldiers in the HQ room with them were a higher level. There seemed to be six ranks in the base, and in the Russian style; the lowest being a private, grading up to corporal, sergeant, master sergeant, lieutenant, captain, and then Commander – a rank she had only seen Nikolaevsky possess. None of the twenty or so soldiers with them now were below Lieutenant rank, although she would happily stake her life on the fact that these twenty soldiers did not comprise of all of Syndrome's officers. Just the best, the brightest, the ones who could be relied on to act intuitively with information at hand and make efficient decisions with only seconds of their need being called.

Whatever the outcome of this little dialogue, Syndrome was taking no chances with the security of his base. Violet could see that each officer held a recoilless rifle in a firm grip and had a small radio clipped to their belt; defence _and_ communication to mobile soldier units. Efficient.

The officers' armour was nothing like Nikolaevsky's heavy plate, which must have been custom-made for the massive man. Instead, their armour was very similar to that of the soldiers' (at least in terms of its efficiency) to Violet's experienced eye – dark charcoal or black kevlar plating, the only differences being in the gold or silver rank stripes on shoulders and chests. Syndrome was determined to keep loss of lives to a minimum in the case of actual battle.

Syndrome himself looked at ease. Almost ridiculously so. Violet could still feel the warmth of his head in the palms of her hands, the way the bone structure of his face moulded to her fingers, how he had shivered when she touched him out of kindness. He should not have been like this. His movement were easy and loose, over-calculated to be carefree and warm. There wasn't even a glimpse of the icy malice in his eyes. It was all gone, put away somewhere else, a box separate to the main, and he had overcompensated. That very quality showed her where the cracks were and she filed that away for future reference.

He had changed shirt for this conversation, from the light blue back into the white. Violet found herself defining his moods by the colours he wore. White was for business.

This did not feel like a business arrangement, however. They were all standing in an area of the room beside the giant staircase, facing one of the smaller panel screens attached to the wall. The desks and chairs had been cleared out from this area and put God-knew-where, clearing space for the twenty-odd people. Syndrome himself was surrounded by a wide circle of space with the officers hanging back, presumably to keep out of line of sight of the screen which Violet thought would act as a two-way visual communicator. At the moment, it was dead and blank. The little space they had was flooded in light, in sharp contrast to the darkness elsewhere in the room.

The screen itself was about six feet by four, chosen possibly for the fact it looked out onto the side of the staircase (which would look like a wall to a viewer) and thus would afford a much more private view than the wallscreen, which looked out over the entire HQ. Violet understood the reasoning; it wasn't worth giving the enemy a look at the schematics of the control room, and the scope of its operations.

"Open," said Syndrome, and Violet brought her awareness back to the present with a sharp tug. The screen flashed white for a moment, before snapping alive.

"Gentlemen," said Syndrome warmly, arms spread. "And to what do I owe this pleasure?"

Violet noted immediately that there were only two men on screen, and her expectations of the conversation changed rapidly.

It was Dicker and Zharov.

They were sitting on what looked like upturned crates with the dull olive green interior of a Russian military helicopter all around them. Both looked grim-faced and set, ready to bargain hard and to Hell with all that diplomatic nonsense. Violet herself would have been outside their line of sight, so she took a moment to regard them.

Zharov looked grim and a touch angry. He was dressed in the a shirt identical to the one he'd worn when she had first met him, olive shirt rolled to the elbows. He still seemed over-thin despite the ropes of muscle evident on his forearms, and the harsh perception of the camera they used picked up the very slight grey threads in his sandy-brown hair. He was leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees and his gaze focused unblinkingly on the camera in front of him.

Dicker was wearing a heavy coat over his customary suit and looked as worn-down and beaten as ever. His movements were slow and careful, perhaps of a man just starting to fight off arthritis. His voice, when he spoke, was weary and tired.

"Well, the release of my agent would be good start."

Violet saw the corner of Syndrome's mouth twitch upwards almost imperceptibly, for just one moment, and at the same time she felt Nikolaevsky shift position beside her. Violet stayed rock-still and completely impassive.

Syndrome clapped his hands together and smiled broadly, and there seemed nothing forced or unnatural about the gesture. "Ah, yes... Agent Parr? Your stealth operative?"

Dicker's expression didn't change, but Zharov narrowed his eyes. Violet could see that much.

"I carry the demands from the Russian government," said Zharov, in his barely-accented voice. "We wish you to surrender the Agent to American custody, to lower your defences and to prepare for immediate arrest. Your base will be taken over by the Russian government and dismantled."

Syndrome's grin widened just a fraction.

"Ah," he said pleasantly. "You're a familiar face. I believe we captured you at one point a few days ago?"

"Yes," said Zharov expressionlessly.

"Pleased to see you're looking well," said Syndrome good-naturedly. "Unfortunately, I'm afraid I can't acquiesce to your request. Purely business reasons, you understand... nothing personal."

"Then I have been instructed to use deadly force, if necessary, to infiltrate your compound and halt its operations," said Zharov immediately. He had evidently been awaiting such a response, and by the looks of his expression, this latter option would suit his psychological state much more aptly. "We will then forcibly terminate the base's operations and destroy it if deemed necessary."

"And what do the Americans think of all this... brutality?" asked Syndrome, addressing Dicker with an almost obscenely cheerful expression. Dicker leaned forward in his chair slightly.

"We don't care. I want Parr back alive and unharmed. The U.S. government has pledged support of the Russian government in their actions if necessary, but all I really want is Parr back, without bloodshed." Dicker's response was grave and measured, and Violet saw hope in this.

Syndrome spread his hands. "Sounds reasonable. However..." He laced his fingers underneath his chin, a grave and thoughtful look on his features. "You see, there might be a slight problem with your retaliation plans..."

"No. There is not," said Zharov harshly.

Syndrome held up his hands in a placatory gesture. "Do you not wish to discuss terms first, gentlemen?" There was a mocking edge to his voice.

Zharov visibly riled. "No. The last I saw of Parr, she was being shot at by your soldiers. I want to know that she's alive, and I want to know _now_ before we go any further."

Syndrome shrugged. "Fair enough," he said, and he looked over at Nikolaevsky.

It must have been a pre-set signal, Violet thought. Nikolaevsky immediately placed a hand on Violet's shoulder in a slight suggestion for her to move before Nikolaevsky forced her. Violet went with the flow for a moment, allowing herself to be gently propelled forward and into the camera's visual range.

"Agent," she said quietly, and moved her gaze to Zharov. "Kasatka. I'm glad you got back all right."

Seeing their faces on the screen focusing on her was like coming home a little bit. Such familiarity was a long-lost emotion, something she'd ignored in past days while just trying to stay alive. A thin tendril of relief that this might soon be out of her hands snaked treacherously through her, and Violet ruthlessly quashed the impulse. Syndrome was going to be _her_ responsibility in this mess; she knew this intuitively. There was too much going on between them for her to simply relinquish contact – there was too much that needed explaining, that needed finishing.

To her surprise, the expressions of the two men were locked solid, cold and angry. When Zharov spoke, his voice was full of ice, and his gaze was centred somewhere over her left shoulder.

"You are going to burn for what you have done to her," he said a simple, no-nonsense tone.

Violet glanced over her shoulder, and caught Syndrome's flat gaze with a puzzled one of her own. In a moment of near-perfect wordless communication, Syndrome's eyes flicked down her body and back up again. She understood instantly and turned back to the screen. She crossed her arms over her stomach to hide the worst of the scarring over her abdomen, and fixed the two men with a piercing stare.

"We'll discuss that later," she said, her tone a clear warning. How could she have been so _stupid?_ Her top was lying in shreds elsewhere and the two men had never seen any scars on her, barring the one on her face. What were they going to think? "We have a much more serious issue."

They didn't seem to take the hint. Dicker leaned forward on his seat, very carefully, and clasped his hands in front of him. His face was grave and serious. "Violet," he said softly. "What did he do to you?"

"Nothing that hasn't been done before," Violet responded steadfastly. "_Now_ will you listen to me?"

Dicker didn't move an inch, and when he spoke, his voice was almost a whisper. "Violet... _what did he do to you?_"

Violet rolled her eyes and strode forward another few paces to the screen in front of her.

"Agent, _there are more important things at risk here!_ This is not a personal matter! Please, can we focus on the situation at hand?"

It took her a few moments to register the shock in their eyes. She had never raised her voice to either of them in the entire time they had known her. It must have looked like she was cracking, losing control. Violet glared at them a little, feeling the hot burn of guilt under her skin like corrosive acid eating away at her self-control. Her focus held strong and confident for now, but she knew it was getting more and more brittle. She could feel it getting shallower and harder in her fingertips, like a wafer-thin pane of glass shatterable by one tolerably determined push.

Violet was at a disadvantage here but she could still twist it, could alter the footsteps of the dance without disrupting the flow. Syndrome thought only in blacks and whites, one choice or another. He had no perception of the grey areas, a fact that Violet had been continually preying on for the last few days without realising it. He didn't understand a person's concept of self-compromise.

What had he done in _this_ situation? Well, from his perspective, he had placed Violet into a position where she could either betray her beliefs and sell herself out to him or be the cause of a world-wide crash. He thought he was making her protect him, to her chagrin and Dicker's disappointment. When viewed from _another_ angle, however, he had just placed Violet and all of her knowledge about him smack in front of his opponents. She knew his history, his weaknesses, and all of his strengths (which was a weakness in and of itself). Violet knew all of this so, when Dicker opened his mouth to respond, Violet cut straight across him.

"Agent," she said, voice hard and businesslike. "Dig up all the files on that man." She jerked a thumb over her shoulder at Syndrome. "Start looking through all the business reports for these major companies for the last four years." Violet rattled off a list of names she had seen on Syndrome's HQ screen, mind moving madly, trying to think of loopholes, weaknesses, little-known legislation that would lend the governments an edge. This war wasn't going to fought with weapons, but numbers. "He owns most of them. Take him down, and the world's economy goes down with him. _You cannot fight this here._ Get lawyers and accountants onto it, find loopholes, inform the companies of the illegalities, invoke government rights. He's too strong."

Violet had talked fast, expecting at any moment to feel herself being dragged away, so she wasn't surprised when hands clamped onto her and started to pull. Dicker recognised her speed and also the blunt fact that two men were trying to drag her away.

"What name are the files under?" he asked, quickly and harshly. He was leaning forward on his makeshift seat, staring at her with an intensity she had never seen before. She understood instantly, then, Dicker's position in the NSA; why he was feared and respected and held in awe. His was the expression of efficient machines building up speed, a slow steady whine of turbines gearing up to a ferocious peak.

Violet smiled mirthlessly, leaning all her weight forwards, holding off being dragged away for just a few more precious seconds. She looked Dicker right in the eye and said, "Syndrome."

The unrelenting hands on her arms and shoulders won out then and she was yanked mercilessly off-balance and into the mercy of her captors, a factor she knew was about as reliable as Syndrome's mental state. She was pulled away, out of the circle of light cast by the single lamp in the ceiling, and God knows where she would have been taken if Dicker hadn't raised a single hand and said, tiredly, "Wait."

Syndrome gave a curt nod and the two lieutenants pulling Violet back paused a moment. Violet took that moment to regain her balance and observed Syndrome again. His mouth was a grim line, his eyes reflecting that anger and malice he had so successfully hidden only seconds before. Violet felt a thin suggestion of satisfaction. _It's your game, Syndrome, but it's my rules._

"Is this true?" asked Dicker softly. "Codename Syndrome? Buddy Pine?" Violet saw Syndrome visibly stiffen at the mention of his given name. "Violet says you're untouchable. Is she right?"

Syndrome smiled again, and there was nothing easygoing about it at all. "Exactly right, old man. Take me down, if you can, and the world goes with me."

Dicker pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, closing his eyes to sigh almost imperceptibly. "Bring Violet back. I need to confirm this with her."

Syndrome nodded jerkily and Violet found herself being dragged toward the circle of light, out of the darkness. She twitched her shoulders and her captors released her, allowing her to walk back toward Syndrome without 'aid'.

She greeted Dicker with a nod of her head as soon as she was within range of the camera mounted within the screen. Aside from a few captains around the fringes, Syndrome and herself were the focus of the two men onscreen.

"Is it true?" repeated Dicker gravely, lacing his fingers together in front of his mouth. Violet threw a brief look at Syndrome's grim yet satisfied expression, and nodded again.

"He has... extensive influences. Not just those companies I mentioned. Different sectors, different areas, different levels of funding, but it's all there. He keeps it moving. He keeps it working." Violet took a breath for a moment, and as she spoke her next words she was overcome with a furious sense of impotent anger and injustice that she fought to not show on her face. "We need him. For now, at least. He's too tied in."

She clenched her fists tightly then, loosening them rapidly when she realised the way Zharov was looking at her. She'd never shown such a display of temper lost to him before, mild as it was.

Dicker exhaled heavily and his eyes moved on to Syndrome. "Mr. Pine?" he asked quietly, and Violet _felt_ the tension coming from Syndrome at those words. _No_, she thought, agreeing with Syndrome on this one. _That's not his name, if it ever really belonged to him. Not today, and not ever._

"I take it we will have to... commence negotiations, to phrase it politely. This is out of my hands."

Zharov spoke then. "And what about Violet?" he asked, addressing Syndrome directly. Syndrome turned slightly and fixed Violet with a hard stare. Violet matched it easily, the self-justified rage between them like a palpable aura.

Speaking very deliberately, not removing his harsh stare from Violet's own, he said "We'll discuss that later, gentlemen. Call back when you're ready to negotiate."

The screen blanked out, and there was silence for a second before Nikolaevsky abruptly seized control of the moment. Barking out a string of orders in both English and Russian, the crowd of officers began to disperse. Nikolaevsky gently took hold of one of Violet's arms. There was no malice in his motions, but it still communicated that it could be an option. Violet never broke her gaze from Syndrome, seemingly ignoring the burly Russian.

"You are my bargaining tool," Syndrome said, so softly that only Violet heard him. He approached her slowly then, cruelty evident in his features, and raised her chin with cool fingers. "I'm going to use you to get exactly what I want from the governments and then I'll release you to them. And they'll never know that I would have let you go for nothing." He paused, and said in a mocking half-snarl, "You're worthless now."

It should have at least offended Violet's pride, but it didn't. She resisted Nikolaevsky's attempts to pull her away with a gentle immovability that would not be construed as hostile.

"We're all bought and sold," she said simply. "Some more than others. Some more than once." Y_ou sold me, first to Harker and now to those who care about me, all because my father sold you out in the first place. What_ am _I to you? _

It was a low blow, and she knew it hit home when he failed to react. _You_ know _I'm not yours to spend,_ she thought with a touch of satisfaction. _You know that what you have here is a situation that's been wrong for years. _

Violet turned then and allowed Nikolaevsky to cautiously guide her away from Syndrome, toward the staircase, into the darkness and up and away. They had taken a few steps when Syndrome's voice made her pause a moment.

"I have responsibility."

His voice echoed oddly in the emptying room and Violet glanced back, ignoring Nikolaevsky's controlling hand on her upper arm. Syndrome was not crass enough to add a rhetorical _Don't I?_

Violet didn't nod or shake her head. He knew it to be truth. He was accountable for parts of her, and for the memories that came with it.

"_As do you,_" he added in a desperate attempt at a snarl.

No. That wasn't true. She'd done what she had to do, and there was very little involvement on her part of Syndrome's formation into the wounded, rage-ridden creation he had become. But Syndrome seemed to draw a strange comfort from saying it, a weird karmic balance for damage done. She allowed him that for the courtesy of her freedom and carried on walking. Her back was to him and she didn't see his expression, but she didn't want to know. He was washing his hands of her – not even her death would be satisfactory, he wanted her to _suffer_ for what he thought she had done to him – and although he considered it the ending, _she_ didn't. There was something left undone, some loose end still unravelled.

_He knows everything, and he hurts, even if it's not for you._

The thought was a cool whisper into her mind and it stayed in her thoughts even as she left the room behind her.

* * *

_To be continued. And, for those who are concerned, this isn't the last we've seen of one Buddy Pine..._


	13. xiii

_We soldier on, through Hell's high water;__  
This war's a losing fight.  
__The past is gone, the future further  
__Retreating out of sight.__  
And after the fire has died  
Will the light still remain in your eyes?  
We twist and turn, with pains unmentioned  
To speak is suicide.  
The hunger fades with malnutrition  
When tears and tongues collide.  
And after the fire has died  
Will the light still remain in your eyes?  
And after the darkness has swallowed every sign  
Will you still be there undefined?_  
- Undefined: Mad At Gravity

* * *

It had been three days since First Contact, as someone had oh-so-humourously termed it. Three days of shipping in government officials, finance lawyers, economy experts and the like. Three days of setting up military lockdown around Pine's base. Three days of Dicker digging through government files for anything, anything at all, that could help them. As he reviewed the notes, he wondered if it was enough.

They'd constructed a fairly thorough profile of Pine-slash-Syndrome using old NSA files and by tracking his financial movements. Violet had been right. Dicker knew of Violet's unusual perception in such matters; Hell, it'd been why he'd _sent_ her on the damn mission, much to Dicker's personal chagrin. He seemed to have a habit of sending her on seemingly innocuous missions that nevertheless evolved into something truly horrifying.

The word 'horror' hung around his sleep-deprived brain for a moment and Dicker regarded it with some puzzlement until, with a perceptible _clunk_, he realised why the word held so much meaning for him. The scars. Oh God, the _scars_. Whatever Pine had done to her was going to be paid back plus interest.

Dicker was, by nature, a rational person. Logical, when he had to be. Occasionally calculating, although he accepted that wasn't his forté. And that side was picking away at the shock-soaked image of Violet's be-scarred form, starting with her facial scar and moving downwards. There had been bruises, sure, and some other evidence of a tough time had by all. But... no blood, despite a few light cuts marring the imperfections. She had been clean and had functioned despite her obvious physical exhaustion. The scars on her (startlingly) thin frame were old and healed relics, evidence of history books shut for a good few years, and the existing injuries were superficial. Nothing major.

There had been something strange in her eyes too, a weird glittering presence. It was as though her eyes had been open for far too long and had a sort of dry sheen to them that showed how they had not rested for a while. She looked half-manic, not quite together despite the way she held herself. It was as though she was looking over her own shoulder and making sure that everything was held together right. Gone was the cool, cold, calm precision that had marked her last few years. Instead, what he was presented with was the image of a girl (yes, a _girl_) literally holding herself together on just this side of being shaken loose; as though she were held together with nothing more than failing glue and a few well-chosen prayers.

Was she aware she looked like that? Probably not. The control he'd seen in her had been iron, despite its revelation to him. Even if Pine hadn't caused those torture scars, what could he have done to her that could have unravelled her so much?

It was a question, he grudgingly admitted, that would have to be waylaid for the more pressing matter at hand.

The situation, as some of the younger members of staff might have termed it, had gone nuclear. Dicker presumed the idiom had come from the fact that the circumstances had exploded and caused about as much damage and disruption as an atomic blast, complete with its own nasty fallout. Despite her shaken state Violet had been spot-on. Pine was in deep. _Deep_. So deep, in fact, he had become part of the cloth rather than a very annoying stitch pattern. Dicker's instincts, well-honed and improved like teak over the passing of time, were giving him a low swooping sensation in the pit of his stomach. This was not going to go well. Not at all. Pine had planned too well and had probably taken even _this_ circumstance into consideration beforehand. Negotiations had so far concluded that Pine had the world's fiscal market by the, ah, _unmentionables_, and was well-equipped to squeeze. Hard.

They'd struck their first deal, though. Although general policy was not to negotiate with terrorists, they'd agreed that Violet would be released on the condition that the two governments removed military lockdown, retired to an acceptable distance, and continued negotiations from there.

The problem here was the word 'terrorist'. Definitions did not include playing the stock market, and that was _another_ loophole that Pine would use to wriggle out of. He had made no attack on foreign soil, or even on home soil. He had just quietly and efficiently made money, and (to add insult to injury) all of it had even been legally taxed through the companies he'd used... companies whose shareholders he was clearly (if very small-print-slyly) named on. In fact, the most serious charge that the lawyers had come up with so far was illegal immigration, and even that was questionable as his businesses were covered under international law. Because of these things, the balance was changing and Dicker could feel it. It was shifting towards Pine. The U.S. and Russian armies had had the initial advantage with their surprise attack, and had (thankfully) held back an initial strike on Dicker's authority, choosing to communicate instead.

_This_ is where it had gotten them. Violet was coming home – their initial objective – but she had uncovered a rats' nest of political and fiscal troubles. He was legal and he was powerful, grown strong on the soils and spoils of corporations gone global. God knows how much more influence Pine would have garnered for himself had he been left just a little longer... months, even.

Dicker and Zharov had slept little the past three days or so, mostly as they held an active role in all negotiations and also because they each had a set of skills specific to the case. Dicker knew Violet, and Zharov knew Pine – at least, he was the only person who had seen the inside of the Base and emerged to tell the tale, and also the only person available who had any working knowledge of Pine at _all_.

Well... not quite the _only_ person. A well-placed and -timed call to one Robert Parr had yielded some more highly-personal information about the man. Dicker had been careful to keep Violet's name out of the conversation – Bob was a friend and an ally, and there was nothing Bob could have done to help his daughter. Dicker didn't wish that kind of helplessness on _anyone_.

"We're here", said a voice suddenly, disrupting Dicker's deep reverie, and he blinked himself back to wakefulness.

The inside of the 'copter was a drab olive to match its outsides. Whoever had designed the exterior had been equally as unimaginative when designing its interior, and as Dicker levered himself from the strapped passenger seats he wondered why comfort was not a top priority when dealing with a vehicle designed for large passenger capacity.

The twenty or so soldiers around him, an uneven mix of Russian and U.S. infantry, opened the door to the helicopter and descended like a well-armed swarm of locusts. The area around the helicopter was checked almost over-excessively, but everything must have been okay because thirty seconds later Dicker and Zharov were being escorted out.

The area chosen was neutral ground – or at least, Dicker hoped so. It was a flat stretch of snow and ice north of the Base. Tactically, it had its advantages – the days was clear and sunny, meaning that there was good visibility in all directions on the flat expanse of powdered snow marred only by a few dead trees that interrupted unbroken plain. There was no cover for an opposing armed force and nowhere for them to be concealed. The place had been swept with a heat sensor which had registered no life forms at all.

On the other hand... the helicopter had no cover and no defendable position. They were horribly exposed. The soldiers were well-padded with arctic gear and had snow goggles to cut glare, but that wouldn't give them an edge over camouflaged enemy soldiers. And the fact they had registered zero heat reading was not encouraging. Someone should have been there – Violet, to name one person. If she was shielded, how many other troops could be covered too?

Dicker heard Zharov's footsteps crunching over the snow, and the Russian moved to stand beside him in the frozen wasteland. The hood of his heavy silver arctic jacket was pushed back carelessly and was halfway unzipped, as though the coat were merely a half-remembered afterthought.

Zharov didn't need to say anything as cliché as _it's too quiet_. What he did say, however, was "Do you think Pine will hold up his end of the deal?"

Dicker shrugged. "Hope so," he said. "Something tells me that he wants to be shot of her as quickly as possible. Remember how he looked at her?"

Zharov nodded, eyes unfailingly scanning the horizons and back again. "There was a lot of anger there," he said quietly. "A lot of anger, and a lot of hate." He paused a moment, tracking the soldiers' movements with wary and suspicious eyes. Dicker thought that suspicion suited him well – it was evidently an old part of his character, an idiosyncrasy worn for so long you can never picture the wearer without it. "She told me she had met him before," Zharov continued. "Not in so many words, of course. But I was aware of a pre-existing history between them. Was it really so bad as to cause all that hatred?"

Dicker tried to think about how to respond to that.

"Pine... had grievances with her father. Some fairly serious grievances, at that."

Zharov shook his head almost angrily, for the first time making eye-contact with Dicker. "No. It is deeper than that. If it had simply been her father, Violet would not have had pity in her eyes as well as rage."

Dicker had wondered about that, too.

"_Freeze!_"

Dicker turned in the direction of the shout while Zharov whipped around as though the cry had offended him. It had been a warning from one of their own soldiers; fifty or so feet away, two figures had appeared next to a tree without apparent warning. Twenty gun barrels were locked unwaveringly onto to them.

One was tall and broad, unquestionably an armed escort. The other was small, pale and slim enough to be Violet.

--I--

Violet might have been a Super, but she was still human enough to be affected by the arctic cold. She began to shiver almost immediately after leaving the lift, a response she could not and would not have curbed if she was able to. It was the only thing keeping her from hypothermia at this point, and not for long. Two or three minutes, perhaps. Her thinking was a little fuzzy and her calculations had the sharp edges polished off through a heady mixture of exhaustion (emotional and physical), cold and dull physiological shock.

_It's been a long couple weeks,_ she thought almost maniacally, trying to keep a crystalline edge on her thoughts and failing miserably. She was tired, oh God, so _tired_.

The day was blindingly white. It seared into Violet's vision, waking up the subdued mutterings of her migraine. She squinted desperately, trying to block the harsh light out, and managed to achieve a level of vision that didn't render her totally blind. The harsh sunlight of the taiga was a shock after the low-warm lighting of the base below.

Straight ahead, like an improbable, forgotten toy, a large military helicopter rested in the snow. It was a seriously heavy-duty thing with two sets of rotors that would work in contradictory patterns to each other. There were soldiers pointing weapons at them, arranged in the best defensive positions available with the sparse cover. They were too far away for Violet to identify the nationality of the soldiers but she was betting it was a fair mix of Russians and Americans, all ranged like nervous boy scouts with Kaleshnikovs and medium-grade assault rifles. _All this fuss,_ she thought, noticing with some detachment the hysterical edge to that thought.

Nikolaevsky was a commanding presence beside her, alone as they were on the desolate snows – he was hard to miss, dressed all in black. He looked more like one of the dead trees dotted sporadically around them than a human being, all darkness and sharp lines softened by his organic nature. He was staring straight ahead at their welcome party, face totally expressionless, and when her vision began to adapt to the sheer white light she noticed a thin seam of doubt layered in with his professionalism and gritty determination.

Violet shivered harder, aware of the cold on a basic and primitive level with controls jacked directly to her nervous system, and took a few steps forward.

Nikolaevsky's hand suddenly clamped onto her arm with all the urgency of sudden compulsiveness. She turned then, quickly, facing him, and the image was burned into her mind forever.

Cold snow, white as death, sky so pale as to almost be white. The sun cast away shadows like a surgical lamp, dissecting the moment with almost clinical dispassion. Nikolaevsky was tall and broad and perfectly capable, stark as the dead trees about her, more militant than the soldiers ranged fifty feet from them. He was connected to her by the one-arm grip that was tenuous without being weak. His hand burned on her arm.

He looked at her then, direct eye contact, trying to force meaning onto her.

"Leave it behind you," he advised in his deeply gruff, roughly sexual Russian voice. "All of it."

Violet kept eye contact with him until her hands went numb from the cold, filtering the words through her locked-up mental processors. Someone was shouting something across the cold wastes – perhaps orders. Violet didn't really register them and Nikolaevsky didn't seem to either.

"Can _he?_" she said at last.

Nikolaevsky let go of her arm with a disappointed expression on his features. It mixed in poorly with the impassion he was trying to display, giving him a grievously disapproving look.

Violet turned away from him, toward the soldiers and that future, and half-walked-half-stumbled forward. She heard the whisper of Nikolaevsky's tough boots over the packed snow and knew he was re-entering the secret elevator concealed in the fake trunk. All the soldiers would see was a figure silently slipping behind a dead tree. Clever.

She started moving forwards then, toward that ridiculous-looking helicopter. Her feet moved in a curious half-shuffle through the light snow, now totally numb. Her socks were not _up_ to this, she reasoned.

Soldiers began to run toward her and she ignored them as they ignored her. They raced past her and around to the other side of the tree behind which Nikolaevsky had disappeared.

"There's an elevator," she mumbled, not caring if she was heard. Someone did hear it, though, and she heard the repeated shout echo out toward the taiga.

_Nearly there now._

A hand gripped her arm suddenly, and she was so surprised she stumbled over her own foot. Startled, she fell without any spatial awareness, totally desensitised and numb from the cold, and when rough hands caught her she barely felt it.

There was thick, syrupy medical shock protecting her rational mind from piecing things together. It covered her vision in disquieted darkness and her only impressions of the next five minutes was a confused combination of hands and white and meaningless voices. She was trying to sink down into the exhaustion, trying so _hard_ to let go and drift away, but everything was so jumbled up that her sore mind couldn't settle. Her thoughts _hurt_, as though they were too hot... as though the machinery of her brain had been running too long.

She blinked and Dicker was there.

"Agent Dicker," she said, noticing how cold her lips were. Violet blinked again and the world reintroduced itself for her inspection. Drab green walls, metal, a familiar construction: a helicopter. There was noise of people, and also the muffled sound of rotors – there were soldiers all around her and some grey-uniformed officials, mindless chatter in the hollow belly of the craft flying through empty air.

Violet was warm; she was ensconced by a very thick silver coat. She was sitting on a crate, by the feel of it. The man in front of her was unsmiling but there was no mistaking the warmth, delight, elation and satisfied weariness in his eyes. He was seated similarly and leaning across the short divide between them.

"Agent Parr," Dicker said warmly. Violet didn't smile back.

"Taiga," said another voice, its owner kneeling by her. She blinked exhausted eyes and focused, and then Zharov was there too, clad in his standard olive shirt and army pants.

"Sergeant," she said with some difficulty. So many things had happened. So much, in so short a space, and with no rest. Her body was pulling the switches now, trying to turn off the lights and lock the factory up for a good while.

Zharov's face was clouded with fury. "Damn it!" he snarled, gripping her chin with his fingers and peering into her eyes with a flashlight. She frowned and shied away from it, but Zharov pulled her chin back to face him. "You will_ never, ever_ do anything like that again!"

"I don't take orders," she said, trying not to slur. Zharov pocketed the flashlight, released her chin, and stared into her face with a frightening intensity.

"You will when I am _really, really angry,_" he half-shouted, gripping her by the shoulders. He looked as though he wanted to hug her, but Violet didn't want to be touched. Not now, not when she felt so raw.

"How are you feeling?" asked Dicker, grave voice speckled with concern. Violet let her eyes close and found solace in the barricades of darkness behind them.

"I'm so tired," she whispered. There were walls in her mind collapsing like the fabled battlements of Jericho, and she didn't have any energy at all to stop it. She just wanted to sleep. That way the demolition wouldn't hurt quite so much.

The hands on her shoulders hadn't let go, but one shifted to her wrist and she opened her eyes to find Zharov ducking under one of her arms. He stood, taking her with him and pulling her arm taught across his shoulder, supporting her. She rose without question, feeling the vibration of the 'copter through her now-bare feet, and walked mindlessly toward the rear of the hold with him. The heat of his body was a shock to her, a blazing furnace which scorched her skin. It was painful, so painful, and she would have torn away from him had she the energy.

Violet understood why Zharov had chosen to give her such support when the helicopter banked suddenly, veering downwards in the odd sidewards movement that were the trademark of such craft, shaping a vector though the air with a deceptive grace. She would have fallen without question if Zharov had not been there to brace against, and to ride out the worst of the g-forces.

Undeterred, Zharov walked the last few paces with her to the wall of the helicopter. Violet observed the makeshift stretcher there completely without emotion. It was suspended about two feet from the ground by metal brackets.

"Sit," instructed Zharov, and Violet sat. She saw no reason not to.

She blinked and everything changed again, like a poor stop-motion animation. She knew she was losing time in places. The world was shifting around her disjointedly, out of sync, lacking coherence. It was all a product of her afterburn – she had pushed too hard and for too long, and her brain was cycling down.

Violet was lying on the stretcher now, covered in a light army blanket. The helicopter was still moving but, as a brief glance around her confirmed, it was a different craft. Judging by the dusklight outside it had been some time since her last recollection. A couple of hours, maybe.

Dicker and Zharov were standing a few feet from her, seeming deeply engaged in conversation with another soldier. She watched them for a moment and was struck by a clear enviousness of their easy interactions.

_How can they be so human like that?_ she wondered a little enviously, fatigued mind watching how their emotions played out so easily. Dicker's movements were slow and cautious, wary, careful. Zharov was deeply immersed in the conversation, one clever hand wrapped around his chin and partially covering his mouth, the other resting patiently on his lean hip. For a moment, his narrowed eyes snapped to hers in what was probably no more than a routine glance, but as soon as he saw her looking at him his eyes widened and his lips parted.

Violet blinked again and everything was gone.

It was pitch black and for a moment terror seized her, grabbing her by her jangling nerves and shaking violently. After a few seconds her eyes adjusted, though, and she saw there was a thin white-blue light coming in from some of the windows on the wall to her left. Whatever she was lying on – the stretcher, presumably – was fitted snugly against the left wall of the room, allowing her to follow the weak moonlight into the space she was in. The windows in question were small and round, set halfway up a wall that could not have been more than six feet high. They illuminated a wall no more than twelve feet distant. An enclosed space.

Another minute or so passed and her eyes adjusted even more. Now she could make out the outline of a figure seated some way down the wall, right at the end of the room on her side of this space. A little residual moonlight picked out still features, shadowed lines, closed eyes. It was utterly unmoving.

_Dead_, she thought, and then saw everything she'd missed the first time round – the torn white labcoat, the spread of blood on his chin and down the front of his shirt, the shard of glass at right angles to the stomach and the neat glasses.

Violet stopped breathing and shut her eyes, willing it to have been a hallucination. Harker was dead. He couldn't possibly be here. He was long forgotten in a Godless grave, soundless and still, miles out of the way and years into the chasm.

Violet opened her eyes again but no, that figure was still there, the bloodstain on his shirt an echoless black under the thin touches of moonlight. The fear was an sharp apple tang in her mind and her breathing returned short and sharp, flooding her with adrenaline.

"Doctor?" she whispered, knowing she could do nothing else. She had to know. "Doctor Harker?"

The figure moved then, suddenly, and Violet froze again. No. It wasn't _fair_. He couldn't be dead _and_ alive. She didn't know how to feel about that. She was so tired, oh God, so tired.

"Doctor," she whispered again, voice shaky and weak. The moonlight caught his eyelashes as he blinked, stood slowly, and took a step forwards.

The moonlight acted as a cleansing agent, washing away everything she had thought. What she had seen as a labcoat was in fact a loose shirt, open to the lower chest, the shard of glass in his stomach a deep crease in the material. That spread pool of blood was a triangular wedge of darker t-shirt beneath the loosely-buttoned shirt. The glasses had just been a trick of the light.

"Violet?" said a wary, cautious voice. It was sleep-drenched, a little slow and thick. Not dead then. Sleeping. "Violet? Are you awake?"

"Yeah," she whispered. "Hey, Kasatka." Her voice was thick and stiff, unable to be raised above a low murmur, and her throat hurt. In fact, there was a low, persistent throbbing in every muscle of her body. She noted this with wordless amusement. Thrice in as many days had she ached this way. It had not been her week.

Zharov took another couple of steps forward, the moonlight through the small, odd windows tripping all of his features into sharp relief. He smiled and the moonlight touched it harshly, but there was no mistaking the warmth there. She could see him clearly now as her eyes had lost some of their foggy cover and her ears were picking up strange sounds. A low, persistent hum.

Zharov moved toward her and she tried to move her head to follow him, but the muscles in her neck choked out a rusty scream of warning. She winced and took in a sharp breath. Zharov hurried to kneel down beside her, his chest level with the side of the stretcher she was lying on.

"Violet? Are you in pain? You said you wanted a doctor."

"No. I'm fine." A lie. "What... where am I?"

"An aeroplane, heading toward the U.S.A. We left Moscow about five hours ago. You slept through our vehicle changeover, even when we moved you up here."

"I wasn't sleeping." No. Definitely not. Whatever she had been doing, it wasn't sleep. "Is there any light?"

"Oh, yes. One moment..." Zharov stood and she felt his presence leave her side, but a few seconds later a low, yellow light flickered into existence. It grew steadily brighter until the room she was in was flooded from end-to-end with that warm electric light. Violet squinted for a moment, trying to let her eyes grow used the change in lighting. When she felt able to open her eyes without them aching, she assessed her surroundings.

She could see that the room she was in was some kind of cabin. Where Zharov had been when she had first spotted him and (rather overdramatically) mistaken him for Harker's body was a packing crate – his seat. There were some boxes a little way from her, stacked neatly against the windowless opposite wall. The walls were a dull white. The room was about twelve feet wide and twenty feet long.

She wanted to rub her face with her hands to restore some sense of reality, but there was no energy left in her at all. Her arms ached with a fiendish dull relentlessness that weighted them down beyond reason. Violet had thought that she had nothing left to give only hours ago – how wrong she had been. This was it. This was total depletion. This was rock-bottom.

"How're things?" she whispered, and she heard Zharov chuckle.

"Hectic. Everything has become a little... metaphysical."

Violet surprised herself with a weak, almost inaudible chuckle of her own. "Syndrome? I mean, Pine?"

"Bang on."

"How difficult is he making things?"

"Quite. You would have to ask Agent Dicker about that one."

Violet's eyes opened from the half-shut state they had been in, and her body jerked a little as she tried unsuccessfully to sit up. "Agent Dicker!" she said hoarsely. "Is he here?"

"Would you like to see him?"

Violet managed to move her head enough for her to see Zharov properly, and a wash of pity touched her for a moment. He looked exhausted in his own way, probably due to a lack of sleep. It didn't stop him looking fiercely cheerful, however. Violet stopped trying to move and lay back properly, accepting the majority vote on that one for a while. Her brain was still writing cheques her body couldn't cash. "Yeah," she admitted.

Zharov touched her on her bare shoulder, and she realised she was still wearing what she had left Syndrome's base in. The blanket that covered her was only pulled up to her chest. The scars upon her collarbones and upper shoulders were still painfully clear, even in the low lighting.

"Okay," Zharov said quietly, and stood up. He was moving towards the door at the far end of the cabin when Violet said softly, "Don't ask."

Zharov didn't even pause. "Another day, then."

"Yeah," she agreed again, and Zharov closed the door gently behind him.

--I--

It nearly broke Dicker's heart to step through that door and into Violet's cabin.

He saw her, lying on the stretcher, eyes half-open. The stretcher itself was resting on a temporary bracket bolted to the wall of the plane that kept her about two feet from the floor. There was a box by the stretcher, just below her level of sight. The wall to his left was being used as storage and had about thirty crates piled up in varying degrees of neatness, all restrained by a thin metal lip that stopped them shifting at descent and during course changes. Someone (presumably Sergeant Zharov) had turned on the two strips of lights on the wall by Violet's head, but at a low enough setting to not startle.

Violet herself looked thin and pale and only half-there, exhausted beyond measure or control. Her eyes seemed dazed despite only being partially open, and she was almost completely unmoving. That iron self-control Dicker had last seen in her was still there but the gaping holes in it were more apparent than ever.

"Violet," he said quietly, moving forward as Zharov closed the door behind them. Violet's eyes flickered to his for a moment.

"Agent," she responded, her voice a bare rise above a whisper. _Formal as ever,_ he thought wryly as he moved to pull out the crate by Violet's stretcher. He sat down with an involuntary sigh and trained his eyes on Violet's purple ones.

"How're you feeing?"

"Tired." Hardly surprising. "What's happened with Syndrome?"

It took Dicker a moment to link the old codename to the man he'd come to know and resent. Making the connection, he threw a sharp glance at Zharov, who parried it easily and shrugged. The question had thrown Dicker slightly and he realised that he'd forgotten how sharp she was. He was expecting her to be tired, drowsy, and not quite together. Instead she'd hit the nub of the problem with her usual unerring accuracy.

"How do you mean?" asked Dicker, trying to stall for time. Violet blinked once, slowly, and refocused on him with apparent difficulty.

"Kasatka said he was being difficult," she half-whispered, seemingly tired by the words. "I know him. He had everything planned out. How difficult?"

Dicker clasped his hands together, silently trying to phrase the wording in his head. This was complicated. How was he supposed to explain this to her? She, who had worked so hard to bring this to their attention, who had put her own life on the line and had sacrificed her safety and well-being for something which had ultimately come to –

Well. He could start by being evasive, he reckoned.

"It's a good job you found him," he said quietly, and that most certainly wasn't a lie. A few more months, and they would have had the world's first global dictator. This small interruption in Pine's plans had coerced him into being co-operative rather than aggressive. "We finished the major negotiations once the United Nation's council got involved. It's been out of our hands since yesterday."

"Yesterday?" This seemed to have confused her, and her brow dipped very slightly. "How long was I out?"

"Couple of days," said Zharov leaning against the wall behind Dicker.

Violet frowned again. "That long?"

"Yes," said Dicker, watching her carefully. There was no mistaking the small gasps of pain as she tried to move.

Still, she was undeterred. "Why has this escalated to the U.N?"

Dicker cursed her eye for detail again, and his own foolish hopes of side-tracking her. "It became... political."

"Agent Dicker." He looked at her then, right in the eyes. Violet was tiring fast. "_What has happened?_"

Dicker leaned back and tossed another glance at Zharov. This time, the other man's eyes were steely and flint-edged. The sergeant shook his head, a minute movement left and right, but Dicker could do nothing but shrug helplessly. He couldn't lie to her. Not after all this.

"He..." Dicker paused, trying to plan out the sentence in his head. "We were forced to come to an... agreement. The U.N., I mean. Pine, he was... he was in too deep. We could do nothing, and I mean _nothing_. One false move and we would have brought the world down with us. So, the U.N... they offered him amnesty. They had no _choice_, Violet," he said quickly as her eyes slipped closed and her expression went completely flat. "He had done too much. The U.N. had to allow him to continue operations as long as they were kept in the loop. It was a sweet deal for him and he took it. The U.N. now have measures in place to stop him getting any further hold on the world's economy. And he'll be moving out of Russia, to a new public headquarters, even though all of this will be kept strictly top-secret. There's a few governments who don't want news of this getting about, mostly because they're deeply involved and they didn't even know it."

"Did he say anything about his supers' research?" Violet asked. Her voice was little more than a painful whisper.

Dicker shrugged. "It was mentioned. He also said he's dropping it. Something about not needing it anymore."

Violet laughed then, a mirthless chuckle devoid of energy, her eyes still closed. "Yeah, I'd say that sounds about right. He'll want to stay as far away from supers now as he possibly can."

An opening. Dicker leaned forwards very slight, and he knew that Zharov would have one keen ear on the conversation.

"Violet, what happened?"

She said nothing for at least a minute, and Dicker began to think that she wasn't going to reply at all. At last her eyes opened, focused on the ceiling, and she said "Nothing that hasn't been done before."

The same answer as she had given previously. Now was evidently not the time, especially after such a heavy piece of news for her. Dicker couldn't even begin to imagine how she was feeling after finding out about Pine's success story.

Violet's eyes drifted closed again, and Dicker was of the impression she was slipping away. He sighed, leaned forward and rested a hand on her forehead. It was overwarm and dry, a bad sign.

"Have a sleep now, kiddo," he said, feeling like this whole situation was not going to end well. For Violet, for Pine, for himself, for anybody. Repercussions, always repercussions. Christ, she was twenty-two. She was just a kid. A _kid_. "We'll talk in a while. You've given a lot for us."

"The last ten percent," she agreed nonsensically in a bare murmur, and finally drifted away.

--I--

She dreamed of bones.

* * *

_To be continued._

* * *

**Clint McInnes:** Heh, yep, tension is fun. And it's true that Violet was going to walk away from this somehow, but writing that and trying to stay in character was dicey work... it got to the point where if I could sit back and it would look half-way plausible if I squinted a bit, then I left it as it was. As for Violet's handle on Syndrome... well, it was a challenge, but I think I've evened them out a bit by the end of the story. Oh: and one interesting side note... how much of a coincidence is it that I have the same name as your daughter?

**Rose:** Thankee kindly! More to come...


	14. xiv

N.B: For some rather fantastic artwork kindly drawn for this story, look for the links in my profile page.

* * *

...In brief, they live to prove death.  
And it is this perversion of agency and desire that constitutes the deepest post-traumatic injury, and the most invisible and pernicious of human-rights violations.  
_- Nguyen L., 'The question of survival: the death of desire and the weight of life.'_

--I--

The Stoics say, 'Retire within yourselves; it is there you will find your rest.'  
And that is not true._  
- Pascal, Pensée 465_

--I--

Whenever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves, after the first suffering, how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers._  
- Leigh Hunt_

* * *

_Three weeks later_

Violet looked at the woman in front of her with a flat expression only just masking patronising contempt, and scratched the back of her hand where the itch from the IV needle recently removed had not yet faded. She wished dearly not to be there.

The office was a medium-sized room, decorated in fine pastel blue with framed pictures and photographs, low lighting. Violet found that this made it hard to focus on the woman in front of her, or indeed anything in the room. The chair she was perched stiffly on seemed overstuffed and oversoft, impossible to relax in. It was so squishy that the chair immediately bent the seated's spine in a position designed by Escher's yoga teacher on a bad day.

The woman herself was sitting on a perfectly ordinary high-backed office chair, and Violet wondered mutinously why she couldn't at least offer to trade places. She must see how uncomfortable being here made her. The least she could do was offer Violet a proper seat.

"Well, Violet?" said the woman softly. Her hands were empty – no clipboard. That was the one thing that Violet found immensely comforting. "Are you ready yet?"

Violet looked at the woman, Call-Me-Abigail, with that completely flat expression that _just_ kept the anger behind it in check. No. That was the problem. She _didn't_ feel ready to talk about it yet, not to this stranger, not to anybody. There was no way she could simply out her feelings and memories to anyone, least of all someone she didn't know.

Syndrome had been different. Syndrome had known already. Syndrome had _understood_. That was the crux of the matter. The pony-tailed middle-aged middle-class woman in front of her, kindly and well-intentioned as she was, would _never_ understand any of it.

It was all her own fault, she thought ruefully. When she had landed in the U.S.A. at God-knew-where's airport she had been semiconscious, floating through a weird time-rip in her brain, trying to stay present but losing stray seconds and minutes. Either way, she remembered being put in the ICU of a hospital and then someone had given her a shot that finally allowed her to sleep.

When Violet had awoken it had been in a small hospital room and to her own frightened gasp. The dreams had followed her through the hours, a strange shifting kaleidoscope of barely-suppressed terror that had left her feeling scared and angry. There were many dreams, all strange and intertwined. She couldn't quite see the shape of them all. She was aware they were all connected – all linked with a crackling sinewy darkness; lots of ideas and images shifting between each other and although she tried to make some kind of sense of them they never did. She had understood them as not real and that the hospital was her here-and-now, but the marrow of the dreams still held a frightening core of truth that she couldn't shake. It, combined with her experience in the taiga, had left her with the clear and solid sensation of stagnation. She was stuck, and she wanted to move.

Violet loved Harker, but she didn't want to. She had _never_ wanted to.

She had suggested a thrice-weekly visit with the in-hospital therapist and Dicker had leapt upon the idea like a starving wolf on a bacon sandwich. Violet had actually had to force the words past her lips, because the inherent _wrongness_ in the idea screamed otherwise. She had thought it a good thing – she'd passed over on letting herself feel for a long time. Maybe forcing herself was the only way to start.

Violet was aware, now, that she had been right in that respect. If she left herself to her own devices she never would seek out the help she knew she needed. It had taken Syndrome's kind words and the way he had held her to make her realise that she was allowing herself to drown in her own blood.

Knowing this intellectually was one thing. Trying to make herself accept it was going nowhere. She stared resignedly at Call-Me-Abigail, all of this turmoil going on under a still face, and knew that she had to stop hiding away. The problem was that she didn't know if she'd ever be able to. The scars were _hers_ and the time spent with Harker was a story she held close to herself.

It was a strange sensation; Harker was something she clutched near to her heart, something intensely personal, and exposing it to someone else would destroy the tenuous memory like watercolours under sunlight. The good things she remembered of him would fade away, memories of his kindness lost to the air. It sounded stupid, even to herself, but there were some things she had to keep. Remembering him as a person helped still the guilt a little.

Violet felt so angry. All the time. She wasn't able to lock it away anymore; it simmered under her skin like a close-fit t-shirt just stopped from reaching the surface. She needed to vent the rage, but there was no-one to understand it.

No-one at all.

Violet realised she had been silent too long. Call-Me-Abigail was watching her expectantly. Violet focused her eyes on the present with an audible snap.

"No. Not today."

Call-Me-Abigail leaned back in her chair properly and sighed, watching Violet with mildly-disappointed brown eyes. Violet didn't allow herself to get angry at this response. The woman was trying her best. Violet knew she was being deliberately uncooperative, but she couldn't. She just couldn't. Not for anyone.

"Violet, I feel you're not comfortable talking to me."

_Understatement_, Violet thought, and then felt unfair for thinking it. The anger was hard to control, a constant presence as it was, and Call-Me-Abigail really was just trying to do her job. Violet nodded stiffly in response. She would be honest, she'd promised herself that. She so desperately needed... something. Something she hadn't realised yet.

"Would you be more comfortable talking about your experiences to someone else?"

Violet shook her head equally as stiffly. No, that would solve nothing. If she couldn't talk to Call-Me-Abigail, there was little chance she could talk to anyone else.

For a moment, long arms and easy breathing and warm water flashed through her mind. Violet realised, with the dull finality of a tombstone sliding into place, that she would be unable to tell anyone else about that ever again. For Syndrome, it had been... _peculiar_ circumstances – four years of pent-up emotion with a certain combination to the lock that Syndrome had known how to pick. He had _understood_. That was the key word here. No-one else ever would.

He knew what it was like to be forgotten, but that wasn't the most important bit. It was that _he had known already_. She hadn't _needed_ to describe her time with Harker to him; it had been a period of time that he had known all about. Not a word would have passed her lips if he had been truly ignorant of the subject. There had been no need for explanations, for speculation or for complex abstract thought. It was a story she had laid out, simplicity in itself.

Perhaps some of this had been broadcast on a mental frequency Call-Me-Abigail had been able to tune into, because she passed a hand over her eyes in a rare show of emotion. The woman had been nothing but professional for the last five sessions, and Violet took this a sign that she, too, knew these so-called 'talking bouts' were at an end, and not a fruitful one. The therapist leant forward with a sigh, hands laced in front of her, brown eyes now with a sharpness Violet hadn't seen before. A challenge. Violet leaned forward as well.

"Violet, it occurs to me that what happened was so traumatic that you simply cannot speak about it to one who hasn't had those same experiences." Violet's estimation of the therapist rose several notches. Call-Me-Abigail was smarter than she had given her credit for. "It also occurs to me that you can't speak to someone you don't trust. Is there anyone, a family member, a friend, _anyone_ with whom you could speak?"

That was the problem, right enough. Violet shook her head and Call-Me-Abigail sighed again.

"Are you _sure_ there's no-one? Anyone at all?"

Violet started to shake her head again, resting her head in the palm of her hand, one finger idly tracing where the scar on her cheek curved around the side of her jaw. But suddenly, there came images – scars, flesh, the body, its bones, _marrow_. She had spent so long remembering its taste that she had forgotten its feel – the warm, living nuclei of a whole.

Her choice was obvious, of course – the one option she had always had. Violet stood then, and shook the hand of the surprised therapist.

"No," Violet said honestly, "There isn't."

She left the hospital that day.

--I--

Violet tapped her fingers on the steering wheel apprehensively, and checked her reflection in the mirror of the car one more time. Her knuckles didn't want to let go of the wheel in her grasp, fingers locked tight about its faux-leather surface.

To stall for time, Violet looked out of the windows at the scene around her.

Idyllic suburbia. It was near sunset and the late afternoon sunlight lanced golden beams through the air like heat. The lawns looked dark green, a healthy verdant floor which in turn highlighted the perfectly clean sandy-coloured sidewalks. The road was dark without being deep. The tasteful low houses were set back from the road and lit from behind. They looked like summer homespun, comfort embodied, and Violet felt so detached from it all that it scared her. Surely it wasn't that long ago...?

There was some kid's toy lying upside-down on the lawn of the house across the road on the opposite side, and she watched it to postpone the inevitable. It was cheap red plastic of the three-wheeled kind, mass-produced in Korea for the modern American and their discerning children. Violet saw it had little black pedals, and watched one of them turn over lazily in the almost-still air of the suburbs.

Violet took a deep breath and closed her eyes. It was easier this way. Without looking she opened the car door, stepped through, shut it behind her and locked it. The keys went in the back pocket of her jeans and her hands twisted into a knot just above the small of her back.

_One step at a time. Easy, little Thirty-four._

She stared at the ground to avoid looking straight up. The sidewalk was smooth and light with the occasional faded chalkmarks and small pitts in the stone that marked the passage of the years and the lengths and strengths of childhood they had borne. _What's years to a lump of rock? _she thought, but there was no anger behind it. Not today.

The air was now completely still and with just a touch of coolness that marked how summer hadn't quite arrived yet. It was still spring, but there had been a flush of hot weather throughout the whole city that had left no doubt that summer was on its way. The sky was a still blue mixed in with a golden-umber colour of the setting sun. It encouraged Violet. Most things she associated with bad memories were white, black, or grey. This colour was good; it was the saturation in her life. It wasn't monochromatic.

She looked up again, this time a bit further than she had intended to, and caught sight of the place.

The house was low to match the buildings around it, but it was unique to her all the same – the roof a soft V without being imposing, the windows tall and clear and sometimes cream-curtained by long-straight drapes to match the shapes of the house. It was all lines without being awkward, contours that were human and inviting, a living thing that carried an air of love about it. It was warm, and whole, and coloured with the living. It was everything Violet wasn't.

The lawn was rich green, evidence of a wet spring. The windows reflected the light in a warm rainbow of ochres. The dark driveway was empty of cars.

_No,_ she thought furiously, fighting back tears. _I've not come this far to be stopped by something like this._

The walk up to the door seemed to go on forever. Violet was digging her fingernails into the palms of her hand by the time she was halfway up the drive, a small pain that kept her from sprinting full-throttle back to the car parked on the sidewalk. Seemingly years later, the door handle was cold steel in her grip and turned easily under the pressure she gave it.

Violet found that stepping into the kitchen was not as hard as she thought it would be. Evidently some part of her body remembered the routine because she found herself shutting it quietly and kicking the draught-excluder back into place beneath it with a practised flick of her ankle. That single domestic movement scared her deeply, and she paused to get her heartbeat back into normal range.

The kitchen wasn't lit at all – the lights were off and the blinds were down. It was cool and dark in there, but there was clear evidence of the sun pouring in through the doorless frame into the living room.

Violet tread softly with years of long practise, knowing every creak and squeak of the linoleum beneath her feet. She trailed one hand along the cold surface of the white counters on the wall to her left, moving her fingers around the microwave and the towel rack. It was a delaying tactic to keep her from walking into that warm and light-saturated living room and she wondered what she would do when she rounded it and found it empty.

Resolve squared away, she stepped onto the carpet with a grim line for a mouth and a flat blankness in her eyes.

What she saw stopped her heart, just for a minute. It was a jolt that had been long in the coming.

The lounge was as well-lit as she had suspected – soaked, in fact. It met well with the tasteful white of the room and the deep, resonant hardwood in the furniture. Nothing was glassy or shiny-bright; the very room and furniture absorbed the light and hummed warm, making it a part of the living space. It was a home where the light fell in high and tender through the tall windows, painted the walls a palette of orange pastels and touched gentle planes over the broadbacked man sitting in the two-seater by the window. The gold light smoothed over his features, a throwback to the glory heyday, and hid the lines about his eyes and mouth. His silver-blonde hair was coloured in by the sun's rays to a glowing gold; his very posture was easy and simple and relaxed. For a moment, he was as he had been to her years before – her whole world.

All the tension that had been in her drained as though she had snapped her fingers and wished it away. This was it – what she had come for. It left behind a lethargy that hurt the very bones of her body. She crossed her arms over her ribs, cupping each elbow in one thin palm. She was so self-conscious of who she was in this place – a stark outsider – and how she didn't fit at all. The fitted black shortsleeved t-shirt and blue jeans were a mistake, she reflected with some level of upset; they were harsh colours in this place.

His legs were crossed idly at the ankle, engrossed in the newspaper he was reading. Violet could see his eyes flickering over the dense text, squinting sometimes at the smaller articles, and nearly smiled. He refused to get glasses, one of his few pet vanities.

He turned a page and didn't look up. He was using the sun's light to read by, back to the window, just facing off to the side of her. His eyes stayed on the text, although he twisted his head around to her a little more. "Hey, Helen, we're out of milk. I was just going to the store. Do you want me to get anything while I'm there? I wasn't expecting you back so early, or I would have gone alr –"

He did look to her then, eyes already shaping the template of the woman he thought was there. But then his eyes widened, his mouth dropped open, and the paper was lowered slowly to his lap.

Violet hugged herself a little harder, trying to hide behind her mid-length hair. It didn't work. She hadn't used her hair for such a purpose for years and she grown out of the habit. _Besides,_ she thought, _I'm so out-of-place here he'd spot me no matter what I'd do._

Her nerves were being wound up as though on a rack. She itched for something to break the silence with. He hadn't moved yet, jaw still hanging open.

"Vi?" he whispered, a nickname she hadn't responded to for a long, long time. She suddenly found it necessary to look down, to shrink in on herself a little.

"Vi? What... are you okay? Violet? Honey?"

Violet did look at him then. He had half-risen from his seat, newspaper scattered on the carpet in front of him. Still she said nothing.

"Vi?" he said again, not quite believing.

It was enough for her. Violet took jerky steps towards him, still trying to hold herself together with her hands and force of will. It took all of her courage to sit next to him despite the distance she tried to keep between them and the way she didn't make eye contact. That would have been more than she could bear.

"Violet? What's... Vi, what's that on your arm? And that? Vi, honey, are they _scars?_" There was fear in his voice. "What happened? God, please answer me Violet." There was urgency and panic mixed in with his speech, a weird soup of worry and confusion. And love. He reached out to touch her and she shied away automatically, like a frightened animal that had been hit just once too often. He drew his hands back as if burned and Violet felt the tears welling up. She kept her face down so he couldn't see them No. This was not how it was supposed to go. It was how it never should have _been_.

"Violet?" he said, and his voice was low and grave and warm. "Please, Violet. Tell me what happened."

Violet looked at him in that one instant, learning every small feature added on that she had missed in the last few years. His hair was greyer, much so, and thinner at the temples. There were extra lines in between his eyebrows and along his forehead. His eyes were wide and blue and frightened. She knew he could see the tears now beyond her control, turning her vision multi-faceted and cleaning away the barriers to the hurt.

"Bad things happened, daddy," she said in a voice that wasn't quite a whisper. She hadn't called him 'daddy' for thirteen years. "Some bad things."

"Oh, Violet, honey," he said, and there was such love and sorrow in his voice that she couldn't object when he wrapped her in his warm arms and drew her to him. She gripped his plain white shirt in her fists, pushed her face into his chest, and cried.

They stayed like that for some time. She would never speak of the 'bad things' again.

--I--

_A year and a while later_

Against his better judgement, and with the feeling he was making the third mistake of its kind in six years, Dicker opened the door to Violet's office.

He took a moment to observe the slight figure typing away at a laptop on the desk. She wore a fitted black t-shirt that stopped below the shoulder, leaving the silver scars on her biceps and forearms cleanly exposed. That, combined with the not-quite-straight black hair that reached her throat, accentuated her pale skin. She was quite the muted orphist of a girl, all serious eyes and secrecy, smooth muscle and firm lines. Her arms were secure evidence of that, strong curves still too slender for comfort. She contrasted with the office in a bizarre, comfortable clash – she was dark and pale, quiet and thoughtful, an image shattered by her vivid purple eyes that (ever so occasionally) had a spark of something other than solemnity in them. The office itself was a pleasant space made of pastel walls and healthy plants, books aplenty on a hardwood bookcase and plate-glass windows. Violet and the office were an odd juxtaposition of styles, especially in a place where she never used to fit. Dicker was once again forcibly reminded of how much the girl in front of him had changed, although it was measurable by only the smallest amount.

An incredibly significant amount, though.

_Is it enough for her to stay stable? _he thought, which brought him straight back to the topic at hand, and he sobered once again.

"Got a case, Agent?" Violet asked, without looking up. Dicker shook his head.

"No. You have a visitor, though."

Violet looked up. Her purple eyes were emotionless and her face was expressionless, but there was an openness and levity to her that bespoke of puzzled curiosity. There was no indication that her mind was still on her laptop. She nodded once at the chair opposite her side of the desk, but Dicker shook his head.

"Is it –"

"No, it's not the sergeant," said Dicker, anger and nerves making him interrupt. "He said he'd drop by the next time he's in the states, though." Zharov had been assigned diplomat to the U.S.A. six months ago, and though his occasional e-mails to Violet showed him to be half-amused and half-terrified at the posting, Dicker knew he would do well. He knew a good diplomat when he saw one, and the best usually had no relation to politics whatsoever. Nuclear weapons, indeed.

Sometimes Zharov mentioned that he took off his I.D. badge and assigned himself to the engineering department for a couple of days just to make himself feel better. Diplomatic immunity had its uses, although Dicker knew Zharov was doing okay with his assignments. He dropped by whenever he was in the states to discuss their mutual... problem. The problem, in fact, that was waiting just along the corridor.

_I mean, what were we supposed to do?_ thought Dicker in uncharacteristic fury. _Deny him entrance? "Sorry, you're the richest man on the planet who has more fingers in our government that we're entirely comfortable with and who could probably shut down our entire department, but we don't actually like you. Please could you and your rather impressive-looking bodyguard leave the building, or we will be forced to glare threateningly."_

Well, that was the thing about entertaining the man who had more power than any single organisation, with the exception of the United Nations. Threats were useless, even with supers at your beck and call. Dicker considered himself a master negotiator for a) not hauling off and punching the man on sight, b) not hauling off and punching the man who had the temerity to be bastard's bodyguard on sight, and c) persuading them to donate a few minutes so Dicker could give Violet adequate warning.

His back and joints also supplied reasons for why options A and B were not viable, but for the sake of his pride he chose to believe in his own self-control.

"Who is it?"

Dicker was trying to think of another way to phrase "that evil low-down manipulative scheming bastard sonofawhore" when Violet's expressionless eyes caught his own.

"It's him, isn't it?" she said quietly. Dicker rested a weary hand on the doorframe and nodded. She was always right.

Violet took in one deep breath, but nothing else about her changed. Dicker shrugged, feeling the most useless he had ever felt in his life. He couldn't even protect her against _this_.

"Sorry, kiddo," he said quietly. "We couldn't stop him."

Violet nodded. "I understand."

_Glory be, she probably does,_ thought Dicker tiredly, and shrugged again.

Her eyes locked onto something behind him and Dicker forced himself not to spin around. Instead, he turned with a slow, measured pace.

"I told you to wait," he growled at the man before him. It probably made a comical sight, he reflected. Pine stood over him by at least a clear six inches and had an easygoing smile on his face that Dicker rebelliously thought was faker than a stack of nine-dollar notes. At least that burly Russian of a bodyguard hadn't followed him, he admitted. Pine had had the audacity to come up here alone. That was a strike in Pine's favour, at least.

"Agent?" Violet said quietly, eyes never leaving their visitor. "Could I have a moment with our guest, please?"

Dicker thought about her question. What he wanted to say was: look, kid, I really don't want to leave you alone with him. Hell, I don't want you two on the same _continent_, let alone the same patch of carpet, regardless of who's there. This man put you through more than you could actually handle, and that's _after_ you factor in that nightmare of a time he gave us nine or ten years ago. When you came back to us those barriers you'd put up were in tatters, your chemical dependancy on sleep aids was almost chronic in the first four months, and you just didn't want contact with anyone. We're not complaining about the barriers thing, don't get me wrong, but this... _politician_ here used methods banned by international treaty, judging by your mental state. No, we still don't know what happened to you during your time 'Away' but you said the scars came from there and we're to stop worrying what 'Syndrome' did. Yeah, like _that's_ gonna stop me worrying. And I still can't shake the feeling he's connected somehow. No, don't give me that look, you know I'm right. And I do wish you'd tell us what happened during your 'stay' with this gentleman right here. What we _do_ know is that you've come down a little from DEFCON One, probably about DEFCON Three. It's not great, but it's an improvement, and you look like you're working your way down through the levels; your fighting style's a little looser and probably not as fatal, though I haven't had the courage to send you on any missions, and you're eating much better; and you're not as... _severe_ as you used to be, even though your thought processes still occupy different sets of dimensions than the rest of us. Yes, all right, you've improved considerably since you were held hostage, but surely there was a less _extreme_ method of toning you down? Whatever it was, we could've given you a hand, surely? Oh, and thanks for getting rid of the creepy stare. It's come as something of a relief, let me tell you. Now, if you could just work on that whole staring-right-through-me-like-you-can-see-what-I'm-thinking thing...

Instead, he said: "Will you be all right, Violet?"

She regarded him once more and Dicker's mind registered the scar again although his eyes never flickered to it. The silver fitted well with the purple of her eyes, he noticed, which were quiet and curious and level. _Subtle_ was the word that sprung to mind. Carefully animated. Reserved and cautious. Still, the worrying concept that he was simply talking to a mask that kept all the emotions well-contained beneath it kept occurring to him. _To be fair, who doesn't act like that these days?_ he wondered.

Violet's eyes snapped back to Pine.

"Sometimes discrepancies are easier to spot when the problem itself is inverted," said Violet very softly, and although she was watching Pine her words were for Dicker. Dicker let a small chuckle touch his voice. Well, at least _she_ knew what she was doing, even if he himself had no clue whatsoever. No-one did, though, and that was hardly a surprise. Bob still called in on Violet about three times a week to see how she was doing, having long since (and with much disgruntled muttering) retired from super work. He ws a training instructor for the local fire department now. Dicker thought that Bob was just happy to see the inside of the NSA headquarters sometimes, but he never kidded himself that that was why he came here. It was always about Violet. Dashall visited a few times a week, and Helen came sometimes too, occasionally with Bob. However, Violet seemed to prefer one-on-one visits, and the room was always warmer when it was Violet and her father. Dicker had noticed how she kept away from large groups of people.

_Still healing,_ he thought, and then wondered why he'd thought it. Still, it was good that the Parr family were taking care of their own. Violet needed it so badly.

"Agent," said Violet again, softly, and Dicker made up his mind.

"All right. But I'm just down the hall. If you need anything, give me a shout. I'll check on you in ten minutes."

"Please, Agent Dicker, I'll be fine," she said in a rare display of firm authority. Dicker shook his head resignedly, unconvinced by Violet's poor decision.

"Take care of yourself," he said, and meant it. He circumnavigated the taller form blocking the hallway behind him, and glanced back to see Pine pull the door shut as he walked in. Dicker shook his head again, and moved on.

--I--

For some reason, Violet always remembered it as a not-unpleasantly cool day when Dicker stuck his head around her door and said she had a visitor. It was summer, however, and the heat outside was sticky and unpleasant. Violet herself didn't feel it. The building was air-conditioned, although not to such a degree that she would later remember it as.

There was very little – practically nothing, in Violet's limited repertoire of knowledge – that would make Dicker burn that badly with ill-repressed ire. The connection was easy to make, especially after she'd factored in the self-aimed anger and powerlessness evident in his loose hands. It was a shock, certainly, but one she'd managed to neutralise. She'd been expecting it, in a half-assed kind of way, but the jolt was still real like the old fear and wariness that accompanied it. Some habits died hard (_like me,_ she thought, with some measure of black humour), and she had fought too long and too often with the man in front of her. Today, she noted with a strange sense of unplaceable irony, he wore a sturdy white shirt rolled up to his elbows, tieless as ever and unbuttoned to the collarbones, and accentuated by a navy t-shirt underneath. The dark blue brought out the anger in his eyes.

The urge to jump up and do something was very strong within Violet – her capacity for violence was demanding that Syndrome should not go unpunished. It was angry and miserable and screaming. Instead, something wired a little less deep in her cerebral cortex took control, ruthlessly suppressing the tight focus that would have come with her defensive stance, whispering_wait, watch, talk_ into her mind's ear. This was a new technique for a Violet, a new sensation entirely. It was as if a part of her had been broken off and forged into something new in the last year or so, moulded into the shape of a point that was so translucent as to be see-through. Its very lack of solidity had shocked her before it had occurred to her that something did not need to be weighty to be influential. Like a word, perhaps, a direct contrast to the tightly-clenched fist she was so used to. And it was separate to her – a new side to herself, another facet on her personality that had mostly consisted of uptight control. It was a _her_ that had been born into the nature of subterfuge, the politics associated with capture and escape, a fragment of herself now locked forever into the role of cool advisor.

Syndrome closed the door behind him and it latched with a click. He didn't bother with the intensity of keeping eye-contact, but Violet didn't mind. It gave her time enough to study him, and the first thing that was evident (to her practised eye) was that the easygoing movements were just calculated enough to hide the thick tension within him. It surprised her for a moment to think that he was apprehensive about being here, then realised her first trip back home. Some steps had to be taken.

_But what could he possibly be here for?_ she wondered. He had left her behind, and made it quite clear.

"How's Nikolaevsky?" she asked quietly, and Syndrome turned to look at her again. There was a half-formed smirk starched on his mouth.

"I'll tell him you asked after him. He's fine."

"Your bodyguard?"

"Was he ever anything different?"

"Your commander, for one."

"And he still is."

Violet took a moment to digest this information. Syndrome was still allowed a private army. Worrying. Were the U.N. allowing him more leeway?

Syndrome's eyes were tracing the scars on her biceps, silver sketches on the pale accentuation of her skin. Violet fought the urge to pull on a very thick jumper and instead folded her hands in front of her. She was aware of their positions – either side of a desk, she sitting, he not. Well, smalltalk was over. Time to be businesslike.

"Why are you here?"

Violet thought she caught the slightest falter of the smirk, but she could have imagined it. Syndrome folded his arms over his chest and allowed the grin to widen a little.

"Just checking up," he said slowly, with a touch of malice aforethought. Violet wasn't listening. She had seen that arm-folding manoeuvre from him before. He was becoming defensive. "You still look dead inside," he added bluntly.

_Quick to the point, this one,_ she thought wryly. Still, he'd never been one for the subtle nuances of human behaviour, proved by his disastrous first contact with Dicker. She'd communicated a lot of information before he could stop her. For a genius, he had some quite gaping flaws in his people skills.

"It's a habit I know I'm never going to break. I've done it too long, the damage has been done. But it doesn't matter now." It isn't a self-defensive wall anymore, she didn't say. It had been downgraded to a more acceptable stoicism, although what she had said was true. She had done it for too long. It was now a part of her personality whether she liked it ot not. She preferred to think it muted her emotions rather than totally suppressed them, but that was good. It was _progress_. What, in the meantime, had Syndrome done?

"Why are you here?" she asked again, and the falter in the cocky smirk wasn't just her imagination that time. He thought he'd evaded the question once already.

"You still have the scars," he said, making a pointed look at her arms. Violet made no move to hide them. "I would have thought you'd have gotten rid of them."

Violet shrugged. "What would have been the point?" she asked softly. "I would have still known they were there." Better to be able to see them than to feel they were biting at her under the surface of her skin. She risked a small smile, too. "Not all of us can afford full-body plastic surgery, anyway."

His fingers were flexing. Violet decided he didn't know he was doing it.

"What do you mean by 'the damage has been done'?" he asked suddenly, eyes narrowing. Violet kept that still, calm expression on her face.

"It was a habit I kept for too many years," she said, gauging his reaction with analytical eyes. None so far. "Things happen, and they can't unhappen. The things that happened to me..." She shrugged. "They left their mark." No more naïvety, no more butterfly views of the world, and there never would be again.

"Then you're just not trying," said Syndrome with a quick, sharp bite to his tone. Violet heard something else there, half-sounded, in the waves between his words. "If you _really_ wanted to go back to the way you were, why don't you just _do_ it?"

"Because that would hurt," she said, sharper than she'd intended. "It would all be pretend. I'm never going to be that person again. Why act otherwise?"

Violet did wish sometimes to be that young person again, to be light and happy and wholesome, but it was long out of her reach now. Innocence was a one-time-only special offer. Syndrome and Harker had taken it from her, for forever and ever, amen.

"Why are you here?" she asked for a third time, adding a pointed twist to her words. This time the smile didn't re-appear, cruel edge to it or no. Instead his mouth was thinning into a line sharp enough to cut paper. His skin was paling too, she noted.

_You can know the history without knowing the person, _Violet reminded herself as she watched Syndrome try to dredge up the answer he knew to be true. The statement in itself held more honesty than anything she could remember. It was true of Buddy Pine to Mr. Incredible, and it was true of Mr. Incredible of Syndrome. It was also true of Violet to Syndrome, and of Syndrome to Violet. Perhaps, and most importantly, it had been true of Dr. Harker to Thirty-four.

Violet still tried not to think his name. She wasn't ready to tread that ground. She didn't think she ever would be, if the occasional nightmares and scattered migraines had anything to say about it. The split she felt in herself of Thirty-four and Violet was a good thing. She didn't need that anymore for the coping mechanism that it had been, and she wasn't the same person.

"Well?" she asked softly, and with that Syndrome lunged forward. His fists landed on her desk with a crash loud and audible enough to wake her laptop, pushed to one side, from sleep mode. The laptop itself thunked to the floor, but Violet never moved her eyes from Syndrome.

"_I can't feel right!_" he shouted hoarsely, half-crazed eyes locked onto hers. He looked like an animal caught in a trap, or perhaps caged and left to starve. He looked desperate and mad, half-delusional with pain and fatigue. His hair hung a little longer than she remembered, she thought vaguely, but not by much. An inch, maybe. "It's your _fault!_" he added in a furious low tone that could have been a shout under different circumstances. "I was _fine_ until you – you –"

Yes, she knew what he meant. Brief feelings flashed through the flesh of her arms and hands – a kiss to the forehead, fingers threaded through red-orange little-grey hair. Words, spoken into silence but worth more than that, closeness, time spent near. _How much of that, exactly, had been a common occurrence for him?_ she wondered. Touch was an addiction – she knew that from her experiences with Harker. Just one touch, meant kindly. That was all it took.

Then she remembered more: hands, arms about her own, warm water, stillness and quiet and tired eyes to low lighting. There were words then as well, frightening ones, ones she decided she could afford to give away. They had started _T__ell me about Harker._

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction; there was the Doctor, who created Violet – an opposing force to what he did. Then there had been Violet, who had created this Syndrome in front of her now, albeit unknowingly. She had responsibility for that like Harker had responsibility for her, and like Syndrome had responsibility for _him_. It was an interlocked triangle that nevertheless made sense.

Violet leaned forward then, but Syndrome still tried to jerkily stand upright from his palms-down brace over the table. His breathing was quick and his pupils were dilated. A pulse point was beating just hard enough to be visible under his jaw. She didn't even try to steel or brace herself. She could see how the tension had strung thick cables throughout his body, suspending his muscles under high torque, and when she moved her hands from their meek folded position in front of her she knew he would try to push her away. She predicted his movements easily, moved her arms forward, and gently took his hands.

Syndrome went taut as a whipcord and he fought her grip without actually struggling, but she didn't let go. Violet knew it to be a self-defensive measure; she'd used it herself often enough. Contact was one of the fastest ways to bring down a barrier and she had had to force herself to have contact with other people. It had worked, though. After a while it had felt good to connect with people again. There was still a lot of work to be done.

It took maybe four minutes but eventually he relaxed, although he didn't reciprocate the gesture by returning the pressure. Instead, he said: "Why won't you ever be the same again?"

Violet tightened her hands just a little and nodded her head to indicate he should sit. He sank into the chair opposite her, and Violet brought their hands together at the centre of the desk. His eyes were scared and angry and petulant, and she knew that he had come here to check that she was 'normal' again... that there would be some hope for his own transition back to a semblance of working normality. _You still look dead inside,_ he'd said. That was what concerned him. He didn't want to be stuck as he was for the rest of his life.

Violet made sure she had his full attention and kept her eyes focused onto his, leaning over the desk slightly.

"Because events change people. Harker changed me forever, and I'll be like this for the rest of my life." That enough was true. She would never be the open person she had once been. Torture had killed that person away, as bemusedly daft as that sentence sounded in her head. Violet was made of new bones now, shaped from the pieces left behind, and she _was_ a different person. That much was true. But the core of her bones was the same: it was the marrow of herself that had always been there.

Evidently it was not what Syndrome had wanted to hear. What he had been hoping for was an uplifting spiel about how, if we work hard and achieve our goals we can become who we want to be. _Not true,_ thought Violet, working on trying to keep him from tensing up again. His eyes were going hard, deadening, disconnecting.

"We all change. All of us do. Some more than others. Some more than once. I've changed forever, but I've changed a little bit more since." She didn't even need to add 'and so can you', as trite as it would have been to say. Syndrome knew.

"How?" Syndrome asked in a voice almost frenzied with fear and self-loathing, leaning over the table, hands tight on her own. "How? _How_ do you do it?"

_It's not hard,_ she thought. _Take some kindness, throw in a pint of pain with a pinch of understanding and what you've got left is the long-term route to living with yourself._

She knew it was a long process. Hell, she wasn't even a fraction of the way through it herself. But she knew how it should start, as painful as it was. Some wounds needed cauterising.

Violet moved up a hand to pass her fingers through his hair. He didn't seem to register the touch, but Violet felt the small hairs of the nape of his neck stiffen. She had the brief memory of a kiss shared between two people who had waited out the day to end. It had been a conclusion. Well, this one would be an opening.

She raised herself from the chair she had been sitting in and, without letting go of his hands, just touched her lips to his. Trust me, she was saying without words. We have spent so long betraying each other, but not now, not in this time or in this place. Neutral ground. No labs, no lights, no white coats. Just here, and now, and today. We will touch and it will be peaceful.

Violet had watched her heart burn for the sake of a madman's treachery, and had no need to watch it happen to Syndrome. He was not a kind man and she had no reason to suspect he ever would be: Syndrome was cruel, and thus Syndrome was life. But she could use as much of _that_ as possible.

Violet sat back down and laced her fingers through his. They were joined together by a hand's grip, a cavern of decades, a pattern of years, a span of minutes, a couple of feet.

She reminded herself of another late-night wondering, trying to gather all her courage for what was to come next: that it was perfectly possible to have one's heart broken without it losing the ability to function. She could see deeply-bruised passions stirring inside Syndrome and she recognised them for what they were – a mirror to her own, just that year or so ago. His expressions all fit second-hand as though shielded by a faulty mask, and she decided it might be best to show him what he'd shown her. It was only fair, after all. Syndrome had had held her and helped her, and although the intention was for it to have been to his advantage she owed him for it anyway. She could not stay furious at him, not any more. _All flesh is grass and steel,_ she thought without reason. _And we'll build skywards on that._

The room was quiet and cool and still, just warm enough to be comfortable. She could feel Syndrome shaking through their connection; just enough to be noticed. His eyes were fixed on their fingers, and when she ducked her head to catch his gaze she saw how much he suffered. He had waited too long to speak of it, and knew what she would ask next. He was ready.

_I know, and I hurt, even if it's not for you._

She said, "Tell me about Mr. Incredible."

* * *

_Fin._

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So many thanks to all you guys who stuck with me the whole story long and really helped me keep it going, and who kindly overlooked my British grammar/spelling/punctuation; not least to my wonderful beta **crzysheelf,** who is actually a saint with the patience of a glacier. No, really. She put up with me and my sporadic communication when another, less holy, person would have garroted me with piano wire. Slowly. Also, I owe a debt of thanks to **SavvyOX** who reviewed every single chapter with wonderful comments, and also **Twistedangel213** for claiming I was like a (foamy) crack addiction. And to **Clint McInnes** too, a belated reviewer who made me blush like a schoolgirl (and who assumed I was a guy. Trés hilarious.) Oh, and **Qohelth,**another man with the patience of a... well, a very patient thing. Oh, what the Hell, I love ALL you people and I'm not gonna have time to name you all. You know I love you. Love love love, and all that jazz. Jazz jazz jazz.

**Clint McInnes:** All finished. What do you think? (Heh, I'm not above soliciting reviews.) I like that you liked the little lines I try to slip in from time to time to, y'know, give a semblance of literary ability. I kinda went overboard with them in this chapter, particularly when Vi goes home. I know her meeting with Syndrome wasn't exactly... climactic (hem hem), but no matter how I tried to fit that kind of an ending in it just would not sit right. Besides, I already had the last line of the story planned out. If I can permit myself a moment of blatant self-advertising, I covered that theme in my 'Purity'/'Taint' Synlet one-shots pretty comprehensively anyway. I wanted to do something a little different... a little more psychological. (Insert maniacal laughter here.) Anyway, I hoped you liked this chapter!

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